Founders - #219 Tony Bourdain: The Definitive Biography

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

What I learned from reading Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----[28:32] All the energy he'd put into trying to destroy himself, he put that into building himself back up. All that negative energy became something else. He became so serious, and so driven and focused. He worked really hard. It takes a lot of determination to wake up early in the morning and write, and then go to a job in the kitchen, and come home at god knows what hour, and get up the next morning and do it again. He was a fiend. One time, he said about his disciplined writing regimen, "Such was my lust to see my name in print." He threw himself into his work in a manner that I found astonishing.[41:17] He gave me really good advice: "Stay public. You gotta promote, promote, promote, or it all dies. You just gotta be out there all the time." Tony embraced that.[56:17] He proceeded to tell everyone to ignore the network. He said, "Completely ignore everything they're saying about music, about story, about shots. Let me deal with it all. I'm gonna make the show I want to make, across all fronts.” I had already been editing for ten years, and this was the first time I'd heard anything like this. Everyone is always just trying to make the network happy.[1:01:51] The line between Tony and the show was very thin, if it existed at all.[1:07:07] This life isn't a greenroom for something else. He went for it.[1:20:50] He demanded excellence, and he never settled for shit. He just wanted the show to be the greatest thing ever, all the time.[1:22:48] It was his life's work, and he never slacked.[1:34:56] Tony gorged himself on being alive.[1:46:13] The world is not better off with him not here. It's just not.[1:45:46] I liked him better when he was just kind of living his best life and looking in the rearview mirror like he stole something. This beautiful life that he had, something people would dream of, and no one else could do it but him. A "slit my wrist" love story is just the shittiest ending to it all.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Tony's unexpected death in June 2018 meant the end of anything new from him. All that he had ever written, drawn, recorded, or filmed in the world was done. A complete body of work. Tony's death also marked the beginning of a years-long process of discovery, in which I interviewed 91 people who had known him, to hear their stories and learn more about him than what he'd already shared in the pages of Kitchen Confidential, his subsequent works of nonfiction, and on television. This book is the result of that process. As his assistant and occasional co-author, I thought I'd already gotten to know Tony quite

well. However, in talking with the people who knew him in his youth as a wayward college student, a fledgling cook, dedicated beach bum, thrill-seeking drug addict, journeyman chef, ambitious young writer, semi-reluctant television star, steadfast spouse and father, supportive friend and collaborator, I came to realize that I'd really only known a fraction of who Tony was, what motivated him, his ambivalence, his vulnerability, his blind spots, and his brilliance. As he said once he became famous, you never know the consequences of getting what you want until you get what you want.

When I agreed to be Tony's assistant, I'd been juggling writing and paycheck-type work for many years, and there were times when I grew frustrated with the more mundane aspects of the job. But if I was going to do the work, I knew there was no one better than Tony to do it for. And now I feel compelled to add that I'd gladly trade this life of being a real writer to resume the privileged burden of making his hotel reservations and scheduling his dishwasher maintenance if it meant that Tony could still be here among us. Barring that, I'll settle for having helped the

people he loved tell the following version of his story. That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Bourdain, the Definitive Oral Biography, and is written by Laurie Woolever. So I've said a number of times before that one of the benefits of reading biographies and autobiographies is not only do you learn a lot from the life experience of somebody else, you get to profit and benefit from that, but at the end, you really feel like you know the person that you read about. You get a sense of who they were as an individual, as a fellow human, right? And that feeling comes after you read the biography. Out of the over 200 biographies that I've read so far for this podcast, this is the first time where before I picked up the book,

I felt like I knew this person. For a decade, maybe even longer, I was a huge fan of Tony Bourdain's work. I read his books, I've watched every episode of his shows, and I've learned a lot about the world from him and his work. And so I was one of the millions of people around the world that were just absolutely shocked and devastated when he decided to kill himself. And what I discovered over the last week, I spent 30 hours studying Anthony Bourdain, including reading this book. I watched the documentary Roadrunner, a film about Anthony Bourdain that was just recently released, and spent several hours watching his shows and listening to him talk. And what I discovered through all this is like, was there's just so much more to who he was and

his story that I just did not know before doing all this research and reading this book. So I have no idea where this podcast is going to go. You and I are going to have to figure this out as we go along. All I know is this is going to be, I think, the first podcast I've ever done where the subject matters. A person I felt like I loved and identified with before reading and spending just so many hours immersed in his life story, which obviously has a very tragic and dark ending, which makes it all the more confusing. So I'm going to go ahead and start. I have a lot of highlights, obviously. I'm just going to jump into the start. I have a lot of highlights, obviously. I'm going to just jump into the book. This is a very unique biography. When she titled,

when Laurie titled the subtitle of the book is the definitive oral biography. A lot of what I'm going to, when you read the book, or if you happen to read a book, or what I'm going to read to you today, it's less like what you'd expect a you know a book to sound like it is very much people talking and so what we're reading is the transcripts of these 91 interviews but put in a chronological order mainly chronological order throughout his life so i'm going to start with his mom um her name's gladys and this is about his early childhood and a fundamental understanding of tony bourdain is just he had a lifelong love of reading. By the time he was in kindergarten, he already knew how to read. He spent a lot of time reading.

His first heroes were writers. Even though he spent 20 years as a cook and a chef, he always had a deep desire to be a writer, and that is the first big break. He winds up writing his memoir, which is called Kitchen Confidential, which I read a long time ago, probably 15 years ago. And it's from the success of that book. That book will go on to sell millions of copies. That led him to other forms of media and then him becoming super famous because of the TV that he made. So this is his mom talking. Tony always had a fabulous vocabulary and he read early. I absolutely always saw a talent in him

for writing. In fact, when he was in second grade, his teacher recommended that we send him to a private school because while all the other kids were learning to read, he was in the corner reading a book. So he's into reading from a very young age, but he's also into causing trouble from a very early age. He idolized like antisocial behavior. And what's bizarre when you study him, he's obviously extremely intelligent person, extremely disciplined, but he was also a junkie. Every hard drug that there was, Tony did. And he was, for many, many years, he was a heroin addict.

So this is his brother and his mom speaking a little bit about that, even when he was a young teenager. I did wonder, why does Tony always seem to be in trouble? He was a difficult teenager. He was not a great student. He was into drugs, and he seemed to disrespect the system. And even from the time he was about a teenager till he died, because his mom actually dies two years after he commits suicide. He had a very troubled relationship with her. There's just some some examples. She's a prominent person in this book. She's obviously interviewed for this book, as was his brother. And his brother's about to tell us a story about the fact that they both

did not get along with their mother. There's just examples of abhorrent behavior on her part in this book. And I think I'll go to, uh, I'll get into that in a little bit, but this is just about the fact that his mom was crazy and they had a very strained relationship. This is his brother talking about this. I think it was the first time that we were,

we realized our mom was heading into her. I'm unhappy with my life years. She was acting out a lot that summer and would get mad about wacky stuff. It was the first time when Tony and I realized, oh my God, there is something wrong with her. She is really, really unhappy and she's going to go off the deep end. And as contentious as their relationship with her mom was, as angry as she was, and just a, they call it wacky behavior she'd had, it was the exact opposite. The experience they had with their dad. They loved their dad. He was a very kind, he was a very kind person. He says, our dad never had a nasty edge. He was just

nice. He never hurt anybody. He was never mean to anybody. And we just thought he was great. He was never particularly successful. He never made a lot of money, but we really loved him a lot. And our mom was much more the other way. So I'm going to fast forward to when Tony's in college and he realizes, I don't want to do this. He's going to drop out. He's going to want to wind up going to the Culinary Institute of America. Before I get there, though, it's important to realize like he really did have two vast, he was reborn. A way to think about it is completely two separate lives before and after the publication of Kitchen Confidential. Before Kitchen Confidential, and I think it was 43, 42, somewhere like that, when the book was published and it was successful, it hit the New York Times bestseller list.

So he had 20 years of being a drug addict, working in a bunch of different restaurants all throughout New York City, to then being a bestselling author and then having the second career. And he says something about this. There's a lot of, not only do I have a lot of highlights in this book, but I have tons of notes from all these talks and things I've heard him say. And he has this line that just gives you goosebumps when you hear it, because when you understand his life story, it's true. And he talks about, because I'm about to give him, I got to back up for a minute. I'm about a lot and he wrote about, and he has this line and he says, I cruelly burned down my previous life in its entirety.

And so when they're still maybe 17, he's young. He gets his first job in a restaurant as a dishwasher. Okay. And this is going to be, and then he's going to go to college and realize, wait, I made a mistake. I really want to work in the restaurant industry. And if you remember a long time ago, I did Danny Myers, the famous restaurateur and entrepreneur. I did. I think it was like founders number 20 or something like that. It's called Setting the Table. It's an absolutely fantastic job or a fantastic book. But something that Danny says in that, you know, now chefs can be world famous uh you know they're almost like celebrities it's like back you know 30 years ago 40 years ago whenever danny was getting involved in restaurants when he was a young man

he was in his 20s it was looked down upon it was like a they thought if you worked in a restaurant you were a loser and that environment that like pirate misfit environment was very attractive to tony but he said something that was very fascinating so he talks about the the getting a job as a dishwasher changed my life that's's a weird thing to say, right? Cause he's like, listen, if I never got, if I never got the job as a dishwasher, I would have never became a cook. And if I never became a cook, I would have never became a chef. And if I never became a chef, I wouldn't have worked in the, the restaurant industry for 20 years and be what he called himself a fuck up. And what he means by that, he's made constant mistakes. He was

on drugs all the time. I mean, he would be high on heroin and at his job throwing it. I have quotes later on or highlights later on where he's so strung out that he's throwing up in the garbage can and getting right back to work. And his point was, is if I never had that experience, then I could never be an author because my memoir would not have been as interesting because of all those mistakes. And if I was never an author, then I would have never been a TV show creator. And that also highlights like his gift of communication, because this is something that you and I have talked about over and over again. One of the benefits of reading biographies is that you see the person before they become who the world knows them later on in life, before they're successful, before they're famous. And it's very similar to like this.

They don't know what's going to happen in the future. And Tony talks about, you know, I'm stepping into the abyss, I have no idea what's about to happen next, as I quit, I have very used to this 20 year routine of working restaurants. Now I'm jumping into this, this huge unknown. It's very similar to what Steve Jobs was talking about the quote I used on the last podcast with Steve Jobs, where he's like, you can only connect the dots looking back. So if you're, but you live your life going forward, so you have to put your trust into something. And he says, you got to put it into life, into destiny, into fate, into karma, whatever you're going to call it. But it's the only thing that's going to make you take that step into the unknown that Steve took, that Anthony Bourdain took, and that most people never do. That initial

step into, I don't know what's about to happen, but I'm going to take this risk is what stops I feel most people from living the lives they actually want to live. And so it's really interesting to hear Tony in just a few sentences, make that connection. It's like I just took one opportunity, that opportunity led to the next. And then I once I got there, I looked, okay, looked around, what's the next opportunity? I'm a cook, well, I'll now be a chef. And while I'm a chef, I'm having all these experiences that most people, most other people don't have. And if I can write about that, or if I can communicate that to other humans, that opens up a ton of opportunities for me. So this is a little, this is a long

introduction to what Nancy Bourdain, his first wife, is going to tell us that he followed, she gets accepted to Vassar College. He follows her there, and she says he was at Vassar for about two years. He clearly didn't want to be there. He was going to go to CIA, that's Culinary Institute of America, and he kind of buckled down. He said that this was something he really wanted to do. Before that, Tony always wanted to be a writer. I was surprised how serious he was about cooking.

And in the documentary, he says something about what attracted him to being a writer. A writer is that you could have very antisocial experiences, And in the documentary, he says something about what attracted him to being a writer. A writer is that you could have very antisocial experiences, and as long as you wrote about them in an interesting way, that could be your career. And the two people that are showed on screen while he's talking about this are Hunter S. Thompson, who obviously did that, and Ernest Hemingway. And it didn't hit me until I just reread this now that they also, both Thompson and Hemingway, killed themselves. So he winds up graduating from CIA. This is when he starts working in Manhattan. This is what he does his first part of his life. But what was interesting is that he had ideas for doing shows and for writing books decades before he actually did it. In this case, he has an idea for a TV show 20

years before he gets to make TV. And so this is going to be a lot of the, at the beginning of the book, it's people that worked with him for a long time before he was famous. When he was, when he was cooking, he talked about wanting to do a TV show with chefs sitting around in the kitchen, talking about food, telling their stories. He was always thinking about that stuff. Tony came back from a trip from France in the winter of 1979. And we were sitting around and Tony goes, you won't fucking believe it over there. Chefs are like athletes. They're like rock stars. And then he made us each cough up $200 and have these amazing photographs done. So you see them in the book, these pictures of a young chef and they hired a photographer and try to, he's adding

a sense of like a little bit of marketing to his profession. If you think about it in that particular moment, he was a visionary. And so his father was from France. They didn't have a lot of money when they were young. What's also mind-blowing to me is before he started his very first show, which you can see on YouTube, it's called a Cook's Tour. They're like 20-minute versions of what No Reservations and Parts Unknown will become. I watched a bunch of the first episodes, which was fascinating because when you he didn't know what he was

doing it's obviously doesn't know what he's doing so but the idea was there and so you start watching that i didn't even know and that's crazy i thought i'd watched everything he'd done i didn't even know about this i don't know how i didn't know about it but what was fascinating to me is you see okay anytime you start doing something new you're're not going to be good at it. And when you compare like his first season of a cook's tour to some of the like parts unknown, like, which is really like a culmination of his life's work. No reservations was good, but he got really, really good at new really, really what he wanted to do once he started doing parts unknown, which is, that's what he worked on for the last five years of his life. But it's, it's fascinating. I think it's very helpful for all of us to go and look.

Okay, this is what it looks like when you start. And this, if you don't give up and you keep at it for 15, 20 years, look how good you can get at your craft, at the product that you're making. So anyways, the idea that he had never traveled. He had been to France, I think, twice because of family. And he had never traveled before, essentially just traveling full time. He was on the road 250 days a year, I think, every year for the last 20 years of his life. And so the reason I bring that up is because he was extremely proud of his French heritage. On his dad's side, he was extremely, he looked up to Auguste Escoffier.

I did a podcast about the partnership between Auguste Escoffier and Cesar Ritz. Somewhere back in the archive you can find it. But he thought that Escoffier in that book I talked about, he famously wrote like the Bible of French cooking. And Tony obviously idolized him. He was influenced by Escoffier and like the way Escoffier approached his work. He took it extremely serious. And that's really another interesting thing about Bourdain when you're reading about him is that there's so many times in the book, and I think I finally, after reading it so many times, I leave a note to myself. accomplish if he wasn't a junkie like the amount of time he wasted just being high on drugs because he's extremely smart extremely disciplined so it says they thought the escoffier cookbook was the bible and they always referred to it and i think tony was especially proud of it proud of it because of his french heritage he really picked up and this is what he learned from it he really picked

up the classic french idea of the job must get done no matter what no matter how you feel or what's going on so that's what you'll see later on where he's so strung out that he's working he's in charge of an entire kitchen he's got 15 20 people working with him that he's conducting he's he's in charge of and he's so high he's throwing up in garbage cans and then we'll throw up in garbage cans and then get right back to work there's a there's a he's in the book and he's also in the documentary his name's david cho if you don't know who he is he the reason you might know who he is because he became extremely famous he's an artist but he's also just a wild person he's like a kindred spirit of bourdain but he was the the artist that um in the early days of facebook sean parker hired him to paint the murals and david he hired david cho

to paint the murals in the first facebook office. Okay. And he gave him a stock options for that. And the stock options wind up being like worth like a quarter of a billion dollars or something like that. And so David Cho talks about the first time that he, he wound up meeting Anthony Bourdain through another friend of his, which is this also famous chef. And now he has a show on Netflix and you might know who he is. His name's David Chang. He's also in the book a lot. Good friend of Tony. He's also in the documentary. But he talks about being interested in maintaining his friendship with Tony Bourdain in one of the first conversations he had with him. David Cho, that is.

He's like, I know a lot of ex-heroin addicts. And, you know, he has an obsessive compulsive personality just like Bourdain did. And he's like, how the hell? He's like, you're the only person I ever met that kicked the heroin habit without a 12-step program. He said the relapse rate for heroin addicts is something like 90%. And this is something I've told you before in the past, mentioned a couple of times, because my cousin passed away. She died from a heroin overdose. And she had been addicted and not addicted for a decade and she died when she was 27 and she left behind a son and I think he was like four years old and so it's that that drug is

devastating the pain and agony it leaves in its wake it's just not it's just tragic I don't know there's nothing else I can say about that but the reason I bring that up to you now is because David's point is like how disciplined and how strong is this guy's inner will? If you, you know, and we saw that because he's completely obsessed. He, he, he never stops being addicted. He just, he, um, let me, let me see if I can find the quote real quick. And so this, I found it. This is David in the documentary. He talks about they're having this conversation and And he says, as I got to know more, I realized it jumped. The addiction jumped. So he goes from being addicted to heroin. And there's a ton of drugs in this book. I mean, Anthony Bourdain is an extremely extreme person. It's the only way like there's a lot of heroin addicts. There's a lot of crack addicts. There's

not a lot of people that do both. And he was doing both at the same time. And so once he gets off that, then his addiction becomes writing writing he would he wrote his book kitchen confidential and all when he had a full-time job he would get the first thing he said he says i'd wake up right wake up in the morning smoke a cigarette i wouldn't even brush my teeth i'd immediately roll out of bed and sit in front of the the computer and type i would immediately i would do nothing else i'd light a cigarette and I would immediately type. He wrote all, I think his first like two or three books, no more, maybe more than that, because he started out as a fiction writer actually. So he wrote several books while with a full-time job. So let's get more into his personality because he's manic, he's high energy,

and he's impulsive. He was manic. He had a lot of energy. He was impulsive. No one decides to become a heroin addict after long, careful consideration. And the reason I bring that up to you now and what makes it even worse later is because he was extremely impulsive during the last year of his life. And there's a lot of people that know him really well that thought his suicide was an impulsive act, that he did not weigh the consequences. And if somebody happened to be there or maybe a series of events went down slightly different that he would still be here and this also ties his impulsiveness also ties to his addiction because the last addiction he ever had was his girlfriend Asia Argento he killed himself over the dissolution of their relationship I'm getting way ahead of myself

okay so let's go we're still in the this is when he's working restaurants but he's a druggie this is what I just said I've already told this to you but I know I left myself on this page just imagine what he could accomplish if he wasn't a junkie

Sam and Tony these are people who worked together their friends were junkies but they had a kind of nothing stops me mentality at work on the line they would turn their heads

and throw up into garbage cans and so I already brought up the fact that he had ideas that were germinating for a very long time one of i already brought up the fact that he had ideas that were germinating for a very long time one of those being tv show another one that he wanted to be a writer i remember running into him in the night in the early 90s so a decade later this is a decade before kitchen confidentials published he had this whole thing i'm gonna write a book and i think one of the things motivating him other than the fact that he had a love of reading and

authors and writers were some of his heroes but there's just something you see over and over again that like if there's people that say you know this isn't how I want my life to be that's extremely powerful motivator so this is his brother talking about you know decade after decade of what he's doing and he's getting to an age is like I don't even know if I'll be able to do this physical work much longer and he says around the time that our dad died that's when he started to say I don't want to do this anymore this isn't how I want to be the long hours the low pay the no health insurance and no prospects and the constant restaurants close a new one opens a new one closes the constant turmoil and then what also people notice around this time is just like these are your people you feel you're

like you you fit in with the rest of the kitchen staff. These are the people you'd like to work with. You hang out with them after work. But he wasn't like them. And he says it became it did become clear from hanging out with him that he was so much more multidimensional than just your average chef. He was just so much broader than that. He had his interest in literature and culture and in life in general. And you see that like he had an encyclopedic knowledge of not only film because it was another session of his but also literature and books and everything else and he peppers his all the content that he made all the shows he made all the books he wrote he's constantly bringing up that like historic base of knowledge and adding it to what he's creating so this is the point in his life where he just starts to get really really serious about wanting to be a writer he's the this is like the starving for success part of his life where he just starts to get really, really serious about wanting to be a writer. He's the, this is like the starving for success part of his life. And so he's going to wind up

becoming friends with what winds up becoming a writing collaborator with him. This guy named Joel Rose. Joel Rose is also married to a publisher who publishes Bourdain's first book. And he says, there's all these young letters are these, all these letters from young Tony, where he's so fucking hungry. I've gotten these emails from people I used to write these emails myself it's the young writer who is trying to sound brash and casual but actually is super needy and wants affirmation he just wanted to be a writer in the worst way he talked a lot about his insecurities as a writer can I do this do I have anything to say? But he was always so brilliant. His mind was so sharp. He was a catalog of stuff that was astonishing. He would just entertain me. And as much as I was a mentor to him, he was a mentor to me. He turned me on to so much stuff. While he had

insecurities about his writing, he was a good writer right from the start. He had a voice that he could access. And this is maybe the most important line about this whole section, this whole time period in his life. He knew not where he was going. He couldn't possibly, but he was willing to figure it out. And so I want to read you some of his early writing. So this is from January 1985. So let's say 15 years before Kitchen Confidential was published. And he thinks he's going to write fiction.

He does write a few fiction books before he has success switching over to nonfiction. And so he's doing what, you know, all writers did during this time period. We've talked about this over and over again, from Dr. Seuss to Stephen King. They're constantly just sending samples of their work to magazines, to publications, to publishers, just trying to get the attention, trying to get somebody to give them a shot. And the note I left myself on this is just this is really good writing. Dear editors, having just read and been wildly impressed by your publication, I enclose these two short samples of my work in progress. To put it to you quite simply, my lust for print knows no bounds, and I am hopeful that you might be interested in printing some other fragment of my current project. It's called Chef's Night Out, and concerns itself with the familiar themes of hard drugs, hot cuisine,

and the occasional cathartic but tasteful bloodletting. That sounds like, I mean, that paragraph right there just sounds like something he would have said on his show. Though I do not reside on the Lower East Side, I have in the recent past enjoyed an intimate, though debilitating familiarity with its points of interest. It is my hope that my prose contains some of its flavor. Okay, so he's trying to be a writer. This is really when you were, I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but the theme here is the same. He's got a desire for a different life and so his dad winds up dying his dad died you know penniless but he was the beneficiary of a trust fund his dad was from like an aunt and then when he dies it passed to his brother the two Bourdain sons so

Chris Bourdain and Anthony Bourdain they wind up getting you know like two hundred thousand something like that. A lot of that money went straight into Tony's veins because he hasn't kicked. This is still a couple years before he kicks his heroin addiction. And the point, the problem was also his wife was a heroin addict too. So they would like disappear for sometimes for like a week or two. And they would just be shooting up and not doing anything. But at this point, Tony's like, maybe I'll just get out of here. Like I'll get out of New York because he was obsessed with just going to a foreign country, somewhere that had a beach and just being a beach bum. He liked to tan. He liked to drink. He's like, I'll just tan during the day, drink. And then at night I can just support myself working in any restaurant. So it says Tony and Nancy were talking about buying a little casita in St. Martin. He said, yeah, we're just going to go live there and I'll be able to go to the beach every day and just sprawl out and tan and find some kind of job in a restaurant down there he let himself be talked out of that idea by our mom i remember him saying i should have never let her talk me down from that idea he was very very angry with her for quite a while after that

i think they went through a time where he didn't want to talk to her because she talked him out of his dream and this is just more about the heroin addiction. This is a cautionary tale. Tony and Nancy rolled out of heroin and into crack. They weren't great company then, but they were the first people I knew that would get into a treatment through methadone. And to this day, I think without methadone, he would have died a lot sooner. And he talks about, obviously, if you're doing drugs, most likely your friends are too. This is an example of that. One of his friends named Sam. Before I got sober, I really saw a lot of people turn their back on me. What happens is it's too fucking painful to watch us kill ourselves. And that's exactly what a drug

addiction does. I remember with great clarity when Tony just threw his hands up in the air and said, I can't take you anymore. When I eventually went to prison, he was just life-saving. He was encouraging me to write, to read books. It was a time in my life when I had run out of friends and he and Nancy were the only ones who would take my call. And so this time he's still writing fiction. He actually writes a book. I probably read it. It's a fiction book called Gone Bamboo. And I just want to reiterate to you the fact that he had this dream of just a different life even towards the end of his life he meets with his partners and i think i'll talk about this later been partners for 20 years on the tv show and he's like i don't want to do this anymore like i have a relationship

i'm just gonna quit doing television because i don't want to travel 250 days a year and i'm gonna go and i'm gonna move to italy with asia and i'm gonna grow old and they're like okay go and he he just wouldn't. It's really frustrating to read and to think about this person that's extremely talented, extremely disciplined. And yet there was something stopping him from doing what he actually wanted to do at different points of his life. And this is one example of that. He worried about him and Nancy just being able to pay the bills. He had nothing and he was frightened. He just dreamed of living the life that he later wrote about in Gone Bamboo. That was his dream,

one day, to be able to just lie on the beach and have a cocktail in some shack in the sand. And so now we're getting to the point where he's going to write Kitchen Confidential. And I already mentioned this to you, but this is the point of the book. I was like, before reading this, I kept thinking like, if you only apply your junky work ethic to something productive, you will succeed. Like he goes through great lengths to score drugs and just all the time that he wasted with his drug addiction. Eventually he figures this idea off for himself and he turns that, he gets off drugs and he turns that addiction, it jumps from drugs to work. Later on, it'd be jujitsu. It's almost every time a new relationship becomes extremely addicted to whoever the woman he's involved with at the time might be. But he says all the energy he put into trying to destroy himself, he put that into building himself back up.

All that negative energy became something else. He became so serious and so driven and focused. And he's doing this. This is rather inspiring because he's doing this when he's 40 years old. One of the few people who can spend multiple decades being a loser or a screw up. I'm like, this is, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm going to change. He worked really hard. It takes a lot of determination to wake up early in the morning and write, and then go to a job in the kitchen and come home at God knows what hour and get up the next morning

and do it again. He was a a fiend one time he said about his disciplined writing regimen this is classic anthony bourdain here such was my lust to see my name in print he threw himself into his work in a manner that i found astonishing and so now we hear the perspective this is the owner of the the last restaurant that tony ever worked in le hao um he winds up being in his first like the show he winds up traveling with tony and a cook's tour he also you if you've watched no reservations and uh parts unknown he also pops up a few times his name's philippe and this is what he said about the the work ethic i was leaving uh as i was leaving he gave me two books bone in the throat and gone bamboo these are the two fiction books that Tony wrote before writing Kitchen Confidential.

It was like he pulled the curtain back. The sort of work it takes to focus, style, intelligence, a big mental museum of experiences and a drive to write a book. I was very impressed. He was not just a cook anymore. He was a real person. I read the books and they were pretty good. And then I was really, really impressed. And so the precursor to Kitchen Confidential was a piece that Tony writes for The New Yorker, a long-form piece that eventually turns into the book Kitchen Confidential. And I knew from the response to the piece in The New Yorker, I was like, oh, yeah, this is the start of Kitchen Confidential. And this is something, we have something here.

The piece was published in The New Yorker. It was really loaded with everything he had in him the consequences were pretty amazing it was not just the intellectuals commenting on it the tv was there radio was there journalists came to interview him at the restaurant there was something that was touching people differently what's crazy is there's there's footage in the documentary he's working full-time he's still running the kitchen and so he gets a call, and this is on film. He gets the call. While he's in the kitchen, he's dressed in his chef whites and everything else.

And they tell him, oh, guess what? The book is a New York Times bestseller. And he absolutely could not believe it. He was convinced that, okay, yeah, that's fine. The book's sold. I'm going to get 15 minutes of fame, and then I'm just going to go right back to working in the kitchen. He had no idea what was happening. And for many years, he has this experience that he describes in this great

metaphor. And he's like, listen, I feel like I've stolen a car, a really nice car. And I keep looking in the rear view mirror for flashing lights. And so he describes, Tony describes his life at the point where kitchen confidential changes everything. He says, oh man, at the age of 44, I was standing in kitchens, not knowing what it was like to go to sleep without being in mortal terror i was i was in horrible endless irrevocable debt i had no health insurance i didn't pay my taxes i couldn't pay my rent it was a nightmare and so this is when his addiction is going to jump he's going to wind up going on book tour for like two years. And that's when he starts writing the other, the second nonfiction book,

which is called a cook's tour, which is the same name as the first show he had. But he says something that was, that was interesting. And he talks about having to, there's a, there's a, who he might be real internally as a person,

like what his default mode might be that he knows is unproductive and is not going to lead to a, to a happy life. He's got to find a way way to avoid that and he uses it like describing another person and so he says i understand there's a guy inside of me who wants to lay in bed and smoke weed all day and watch cartoons and old movies my whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid and outwit that guy and before i transition into his second act, the second life that he had, this born again period in his life,

this is an example because they interview a lot of, they interview like his publishers and his agent and his first publisher made a drastic mistake of selling too early. Imagine having, making an investment, you know, they're rolling the dice, this guy's relatively unknown and the investment pays off more than you could ever imagine this book is going to sell millions and millions of copies

and they sold the paperback rights so she says we we wouldn't have sold the paperback rights if we knew how enduring and amazing it was going to be because this would would continue to sell for years and years and years then when people would discover TV show, they'd buy the book. And so he says, we were a new company and we were trying to be profitable pretty early, pretty early on. And so we sold it. And you're talking about what top one 10th of 1% in book, all books sales. Like it's very rare for, yeah, I read an astonishing stat. That's kind of depressing, honestly, the other day that 98% that 98% of all books sell less than 5,000 copies. So now we get into, we see that his addiction is jumping, and he says, and he was terrified. He just thought, okay, I'm going to have success.

He says it in writing. He says it in interviews. Oh, okay, I know I'm going to be working back in the kitchen. He never worked back in the kitchen. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that he was just addicted to learning a new craft. He was really hyped up because at the point, the book was a big success and he was getting offers from all over the place. And he said, the brass ring comes around only once and I'm going to grab it with both hands. He knew that this was his big opportunity and he might not get another one. He didn't want to slow

down. He thought everything was going to be taken away from him really quick. So we're at the point in the book where we're introduced to one of what's going to become one of his best friends. They're friends for 20 years. If you watch Tony's shows, you know who he is. His name's Eric Repair. He was like the opposite. He was a chef, but he was like a Michelin star awarded chef, like high end is the opposite of the environments that Tony wind up working in. But Eric read his book and reach out to him and they wind up developing a relationship. And he says, I was fascinated by Kitchen Confidential. I read it very quickly because I was totally absorbed by the book and I called him and I wanted to talk to him and I wanted to

know who he was. So I invited him to Le Bernardin. This is Eric's restaurant to have lunch. So I see this elegant man with good manners, smart, very articulate. There's actually video of this because Tony brought a camera crew with him. We had a fantastic lunch together. So we really and we really understand that we are very different and come from very different backgrounds. The culinary backgrounds that we have are opposite. They're opposite worlds. He comes from a ship with pirates and I come from the kitchen of Rubichon, which is like the army. We decided to see each other for drinks drinks and that was the beginning of the friendship and eric also gives one of the best like the most touching and rather sad moments in the

documentary i was actually talking about this with my mother-in-law last night because she happened to see the documentary too it's called roadrunner again if you haven't seen it i'd rent it immediately it's fantastic but um he asked towards the end because in the book and in the documentary, you see the devastating aspects. Like it's one thing to say I'm in pain. You know, Tony felt lonely, but he didn't have to feel that way because everybody loved him. He had friends that he could have turned to, and you see them just crying their eyes out towards the end of the documentary. They talk about it towards the end of this book. But Eric does something where, you know, he's asked the question because he was in the room next door.

He was in the hotel room next door where Tony hung himself in France. And he's asked something like, what do you make of what he did? And he just said, I won't talk about that. And he talks about like, when I remember Tonyony i remember the good times we had together the 20 years of friendship and the experiences we had the dinners we had the drinks we had the the priceless memories that we had which is all this that's what this book that i'm holding in my hand is full of and that's one of the main things i want to take away from it it's like that's the most valuable thing in life if you're listening to, the burden that you and I share is that you're obsessed with success that comes from work or trying to get really good at something or trying to improve.

And that's a great way to spend part of the journey of life. But at the end of the day, like the people that we interact with, friends, family, the people that actually have the memories are this is what they're going. That is what they're going to talk about when you leave when your story is finished when your book is written and it's honestly some of the hardest things to read and to watch you just see you can never underestimate the impact that you make on people around you and what's so frustrating about this is like tony didn't see it when one of the last scenes they're in. I can't remember if this is the show they did in Spain or if this was in France, but I saw the clip and Eric's telling I'm pretty sure it's the last show. And Eric's telling Tony about the impact that you that you've made for the lives of other people through what you're doing.

And he was extreme. Tony was extremely dismissive of it. And one of his friends who's in the book, I'll get to her later. I think her name was Alison. And she's just like, he didn't think people loved him. And this book is, it was an amazing read, but it was heavy. Like there was, there is the last thing in the book is words from his 11, or I think she might be 13-year-old daughter. I think she was 11 when he died, so I think she might be 14 now. And she was interviewed for the book, and I almost did that as the opening. And I decided, like, I'm not, like, you got to read the book. Because that's just, what I'm saying is I don't think I can read her words out loud.

And then when you go back and you see it's mentioned in his... Once you know how his story ends, you go back... I think I've told you this before in other episodes where it just came up to my mind. You go back and watch the Argentina, the Buenos Aires episode of Parts Unknown. He's sitting with a therapist. He's talking about the fact that he, sometimes he wants to kill other people and kill himself, that he's not happy.

There's other, there's a ton of quotes I have from him. Loneliness, separation from my daughter, existential despair. I'm on the road about 250 days a year and I stay in a lot of beautiful places and look out the window at a lot of beautiful views, but I'm usually alone. Loneliness kills, man man and he mentions over

and over again it's so spooky to watch this after the fact about hanging himself he fc i just watched an interview right before we started where he talked about he had this really bad shoot in spain he just got full of depression existential dread and he's like why don't i just hang myself here's another example there have been times honestly in my life that i figured i've had a good run why not just do this stupid thing this selfish thing he knew it was selfish jump off a cliff into water of interminate indeterminate depth and so you you learn from that experience the the devastation that you leave in your wake if you choose that path and like your loved ones are gonna have to suffer like his daughter she could live for another 60 years 70 years without a father decades longer than she

that then that needed to happen and yet at the same time you're almost in awe that Tony lived multiple lifetimes he lived a full life and he died at 61 years old he had there's another quote I want to bring to your attention he says when die, I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets, this is even crazier when you think about how it ends, my regrets will, because this is how it turned out, my regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted, and advantages squandered. All right, so we got to get back to the story, though, because there is things to learn from him. You know, this is like a hard thing to go through, to like think about. But there is, you know, no person's obviously all

bad or all good. This is an example. One thing Tony figured out that's useful is you've got to sell your product. It doesn't matter what it is. We just saw this with Estee Lauder, Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Ogilvie. You sell, sell, sell. I remember early, early, and this is rare with especially people that, less so with obvious entrepreneurs. They don't understand that, but less so with, like in Arnold's case, he talked about how movie stars, they were just pathetic at this. They thought, oh, no, I shot the movie. My job is done. He's like, no, your job is only beginning.

Let's get out there and get as many people to see this movie as possible. Tony went out. Really, it's like the personification. I guess this isn't even the right idea because I was going to just quote Ted Turner when he said early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise. Anthony Bourdain was like late to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise. Anthony Bourdain was like late to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise. I remember early, early on Kitchen Confidential just come out. Another author drove out there with him. So they're doing like these like book tours.

And he says, Tony came back and said, this author gave me really good advice. Stay public. You've got to promote, promote, promote or all of this dies. You've just got to be out there all the time. Tony embraced that and he was really good at promoting his brand. So this is more about the fact that Tony just had deep historical knowledge, not only about the cooking industry, about films, literature, and it's just, he's interesting to talk to, to be around. And so he's able to develop relationships

with other people. These are two chefs from Canada. They have this really successful restaurant up there called Joe Beef. I think it's in Montreal, if I'm not mistaken. It says, Fred and I have obscure knowledge of old French cooking. That's his partner. We've been down that rabbit hole for many years and for so long that we can converse with very few people about the deep, very historic French cooking. We clicked immediately with Tony because Tony knew who, and they're going to list a bunch of French chefs. There's no way in hell that I'm going to pronounce their names. I'm going to skip over their names.

But he says, you know, Tony knew the same people we knew. He had this deep historical knowledge. None of our peers have that in-depth historical knowledge of French cooking. It was like, yay, we have another nerd to play with. And so another lesson to learn from Tony is the value of being adaptable and being able to move fast. This is going to actually, his approach to this rebirth, his second career, because he had no idea. Like this guy's going to win Peabody's and Emmys and have 10 million people watching his show. It's just from where he started, the Kitchen Confidential part, it's like there's just no way you could have predicted this.

Not one bit of this was planned. from the moment he signed up for kitchen confidential to signing up for his next book it wasn't strategized it wasn't building a platform or a brand he said we just kind of we he said we'll just see what happens we will wing it we will we were following tony's instincts that's a really powerful uh sentence actually reminding me of herb keller which is the one of my favorite founders i've ever come across because he's just fun to read about he he had fun like he started southwest airlines southwest is the only airline that was profitable for like 47 straight years and running you know a large airline that that might even seem kind of like boring

to some degree and herb approaches like why well who says it has to be boring? We can have fun with it. But one thing that Herb was known about is that he wanted to optimize for flexibility. He did not believe in these very rigid long-term plans. And so let me read, this is from the book Nuts, Southwest Airlines, Crazy Recipe for Business and Success, if I'm not mistaken. Founders like 56 or something like that. But Herb is just fantastic. And I'm reading this to you because I think once I was reading about Tony, I was like, oh, that's kind of how Tony approaches his work too.

So Herb Keller explains it this way. Reality is chaotic. Planning is ordered and logical. The two don't square well with one another. When USAir pulls out of six cities in California, they don't call me and tell me they're going to do that. If we had established a big strategic plan that was approved by our officers and the board of directors, I would have gone to the board and tell them we want to deviate from that plan. They would want to know why I want to buy six more

airplanes. The problem is we'd analyze it and debate its merits for three months instead of getting the airplanes, taking over the gates, and dominating California. The meticulous nitpicking that goes on in most strategic planning processes creates a mental straitjacket that becomes disabling in an industry where things change radically from one day to the next. And so he gets, in the book, he gets chided by a financial analyst and Keller about not having a strategic plan. And Keller says, we do have a plan. It's called doing things. And so we see this, the idea he could no way that he have ideas.

Like, okay, I'm just going to write a new book. And it says, Tony says, I'd like to travel the world and explore food all over the world. That's my dream to do it and write about it. What if I pick 10 or 15 cities and we can do this? That is the book Cook's Tour that is going to turn into a show because when he travels these 15 cities, he's going to wind up taking, and he's got these, it's a married couple. They wind up being the founders of a very successful production company now called, is it 0.0? ZPZ Productions. So Tony's the first person. It's just the two married couple and him start, and then they build up this rather successful business and now they go on to produce all kinds of things. But this idea that

they eventually evolves, that's just thought, hey, this is what I like to do. That idea eventually evolves into no reservations and parts unknown and is why most people know who Tony Bourdain is now because of that just random idea right there that I'm just gonna be flexible let's see what happens and so before we jump into his this is why i think if you're interested in tony bourdain you should also go to youtube and watch the first few episodes the first season of cookstore because like wow this is so different than than what's about to become but we got to go back to his mom because his brother just hammers his mom in this book over and over again she the fact that she was extremely negative that she was extremely negative, that she thought she knew better than everybody and she would meddle. And it says,

she was a copy editor at the New York Times for 25 years. She was paid to be fussy and correct other people. She was never not interfering. She figured I have the better answer and people should understand that and they should appreciate that I'm being helpful. I think she legitimately thought she was trying to help Tony by calling his publisher and trying to correct mistakes in one of his books. I mean, lady, just stay the hell out of it. You know your son is already a global success story. He's already sold two books and his own TV show. And here mommy is calling the publisher to say there are some grammatical and spelling mistakes here that should be taken care of. That drove him batshit crazy. And i bring that to your attention just because they had a

very contentious relationship they'd go through tony and his mom they'd go through long periods of not speaking because she just could not stop meddling so we have the founder eventual founders of 0.0 productions they're the ones that come to him because he just thought i was going to travel around the world and and and write about it they're like well what if we film it and so he's again working at his job they go meet him at lay house and like uh it's between dinner and lunch shifts they talk hey would you ever consider making a cook's tour in a tv show and it says after dinner shift we sat him against a brick wall and started asking questions have you ever traveled before he hadn't really that is crazy he had traveled france to fr France as a kid and once to Japan for work. What was clear was that Tony was very well read. He had a deep love of film. Those were his points of reference. It was like, I want to go check out the places that loom large in my mind from the things that I've read and the films that I've seen. The whole thing was so ill-conceived. We had no real game plan.

This is about just letting things happen. Where are they going to go? You have a basic idea, but you don't know how you're going to get there. There was no real format to the show. We had no fucking clue what we were doing together. Tony felt awkward and weird and uncomfortable. Another thing most people don't know about him, he's an introvert, very socially awkward, because everybody thinks,

oh, this is the coolest guy in the world. Like, oh, he was extremely socially awkward. He wouldn't make eye contact with you and take him a very long time to get to know you etc etc in the first shoot in tokyo uh tony was a guy coming to terms with the fact that he didn't know what he was doing and he didn't know what he was supposed to do we threw him into the boiling water and watched him squirm it was painful and the nonetheless of myself on this page is a bunch of highlights this is what doing something new feels like he seemed very jittery he was uncomfortable you could see this wide-eyed enthusiasm for what he was being exposed to but in combination with nervous energy and insecurity and so they're like wow this is a

disaster i didn't think that tokyo is the episode. I didn't think it was that bad. I mean it's obviously not as good. It's not nearly nothing. It's like one-tenth of what he does in Parts Unknown and No Reservations and everything else. But it's not like terrible, terrible. But the point was is that that's his starting point. But he was always improving. They wind up going to Ho Chi Minh City.

I think this is the second or third episode. I can remember and immediately he's already starting to improve uh we always say that's that's when the show really started to happen because he had already read so extensively about vietnam he knew so much of its history there were all these interesting ports of reference that started to percolate we were grabbing onto that energy if you look at that footage he's coming alive in the field for the first time he He began to understand, I can actually have fun with this. I can do something that has some meaning. And so the guy that owns the restaurant that he works at actually traveled with him. This is Felipe again.

And Felipe actually, he lives now in Vietnam full time. He was actually in Vietnam visiting when he got the news that Tony killed himself. But this is a good almost 18 years, 20 what, 18 years, 20 years before that happens. 18 years before that happens. And this is the first mention in the book of, and I wrote the word ability. So I put the first mention of his ability to go to a sunken place. And I scratched out the word ability.

And I didn't replace it with anything else because I don't know what word fits there. But his propensity, I don't know. Like he just he was dark. David Chang in in the documentary says Tony was extremely dark person. And so this is they're talking about what happens in Vietnam. It was unbelievable. The whole trip was absolutely magical because of the state he was in. It was extraordinary. Although I should mention in the middle of that trip, I saw him fall into the abyss. It just lasted a few hours, but in those two weeks of complete elation and happiness, I saw him fall like falling from a plane down deep, dark, and then he climbed back out. He opened the window, the door to show what was inside him. And it was dark. And so he's starting to become more well-known, more famous. This is where his marriage of 20 years falls apart. They had known each other.

I think they were dating since they were like 14. Maybe they knew each other at 14 and started dating at like 17 or 18. I mean, they were together for a long time. Now he's in his 40s. And they just wind up. And this is also where he says's just where he says like i cruelly burned what was that line i said earlier to you the uh i cruelly burned down my previous life in its entirety this is the start of that his brother goes to visit him his brother's married

with kids they go to you know let's go visit uncle tony and aunt nancy it says they invited us down to saint martin to be with them as a family but they were sort of in the middle of separating at that point. And the plan had changed up at the very last minute. And we found out that we were going to be there alone with Tony. It was kind of obvious that the whole fame and TV thing was not for Nancy. She did not like the attention. She did not like the intrusiveness. I don't think he was happy that he just split from the woman he had known

since the age of 14. We'd come home from dinner. Then we play poker or hang out. And Tony would basically go out and get banged by prostitutes he'd ride around and then he's getting drunk he's doing all kinds this is he also talks about trying to commit commit suicide during this point but he says it later on he doesn't tell his brother this uh he talked about driving off uh one of the mountain roads in saint martin he'd ride out somewhere at 10 p.m and he wouldn't be back until the time we woke up

he was very upfront about it and then we we have his wife commenting on this point. Once he had the chance to make TV, he came along and he embraced it. Tony was very smart. And I think he realized this is the way things are going to be. It does a weird thing to a marriage. So they wind up divorcing in 2005. The thing about Tony, though, is he was at, and people said this over and over again, that he, at his core, he was a romantic.

He wanted to be in a long-term relationship less than two years later he's married again and this is where he has a kid there's actually a crazy story about that too i'll share with you in the book and so he just he was completely involved in relationships all the time and when they fell apart he would spiral out of control we see that he's trying to think about killing himself he's doing drugs he's with prostitutes he's doing all this kind of you know behavior that's not going to end well um this is wild what i'm about to read to you considering how successful no reservations became because a cook's tour was the precursor for all the television he made and he's doing it on the food channel and this is a good example you gotta have the right partners like he was just on the wrong channel

it was a moderately good number of viewers but it didn't have a breakout number of viewers and it was an expensive show for us so as the years went on i was really pressed by management to cancel the show and so the show's over he's like okay that's it i had my run this is over uh once we said our goodbyes to food network and classic tony form he said when you figure something out let me know because i'll be there we started to pitch what would become no reservations it took a long time to sell it it was a solid 12 months in between the time where they have this idea to actually sell no reservations and It took a long time to sell it. It was a solid 12 months in between the time where they have this idea to actually sell no reservations. And what's, what's, I don't know,

maybe interesting about this is that he was still fighting like his insecurity about, because he said, I used to make fun of TV personalities. Now, then I became one because he, you know, a very cynical, it's weird. It has like a combination of awe and wonder at the world but also deep cynicism about the the i guess the the fate of humanity and um so they're filming the pilot for no reservations he brings his brother chris with him tony and chris did the first no reservations pilot in paris they ended up they ended up having this huge fight in the field it was an existential crisis tony was like this is all bullshit i don't know what this is. What am I, a TV personality now? It was just two of us sitting at a table where he again kind of fell apart with tears. He's crying now, questioning what we were doing and what it meant.

We were all scared of our new venture. We were trying to figure it out. I think the underpinnings of his relationship falling apart were really coming to the surface at that point so the travel channel if you well what's interesting is no reservations goes on the travel channel right it's the first show ever to appear on a travel channel that had a mature warning right because tony wanted to he's like i'm a writer and like this is going to be authentic this is i'm not some fake talking head i'm not like the rest of the people in your network this is not going to be me we either do it my way or we don't do it at all and so we're going to see how he talks to the president of the travel channel here and what some other executives or producers because they talk about in the book how executives and producers think they know better

than the people like like they thought they knew better than tony or other people what they didn't realize and what tony realized is that the way these bland like TV hosts and people were viewed. Yeah, you might have millions of people watching your show, but there's not a deep connection. And the authenticity, you might not like, obviously, I've watched a lot of stuff. There's a lot of stuff Tony did or said I didn't agree with. But the point was that he was authentic and you felt that connection with him. And he was adamant about not letting other people get involved and distort the product that he was making, which is really the main point of this.

This is the president of the Travel Channel that he's going to be talking to here. I left it overnight, and I came in the next morning and decided that this thing was a judgment call. There was no right or wrong, so I wrote to Tony. Your judgment on all other issues with the show seems to have been okay, so I'm going to go with you on this, but you need to understand that I reserve the right to change it. And then he signs off, best, Pat. He emailed me right back. Sir, you have a deal. If, however, your opinion is going to be based on the output of some clusterfuck group, then we should all bend over right now.

Best, Tony. These emails, now this is back to Pat, these emails, they're burned into my brain. He was giving me a sense of the level at which he wanted to operate, and no detail was too small. When he believed in something, he really went in with it and put his all into it. So then they start filming No Reservations, and this is an editor on No Reservations remembering that time. Tony proceeded to tell everyone to ignore the network. He said, completely ignore everything they're saying about music, about story, about shots. Let me deal with it all. I'm going to make the show I want to make across all fronts.

I had already been editing for at least 10 years, and this was the first time I'd heard anything like this. Everyone is always just trying to make the network happy. And if you think about what's happening here is Tony understood that the focus was wrong. It's not about the network. It's about the viewer. Other people pre Tony Bourdain had this flipped. They had it's just like the Steve Jobs Scully thing. How you flip is like, no, it's about the product, then the profit. If you put the profit before the product, the profit is going to go away because your product sucks. Everyone is just trying to make the network happy. And Tony comes and says, no, I'm not worried about that. I's going to go away because your product sucks everyone is just trying to make the network happy and tony comes and says no i'm not worried about that i'm going to make the show

i want to make and the viewer is the person i need to make happy there is an element too when i'm reading this book and i realized he died when he was 61 years old that he really did live like he optimized for adventure and he lived a full life in just 61 years and maybe 70% of the experiences he had in his life were in the last 30% of his life the last 20 years it's very similar like Teddy Roosevelt shocking Teddy Roosevelt I think dies at 60 62 something like that and you read biographies about him read his life stories like how does one person live multiple lifetimes and they do it when they die relatively early. This is just an example of that. There's all kinds of stories in the book. This is just one I'm going to pull out for you. He was

like that friend who went to a party, got too high and needed to come get him because he found himself in a place he shouldn't be. We got a call one night. He was somewhere on a super yacht in the Mediterranean with a bunch of Saudi royalty. He called from the boat and said, can you help me? Can you help get me home? I might be in over my head here. Can somebody please help me out? It was three o'clock in the morning. That was the beauty of Tony. You're where he had always found his way into some weird places. So then we hear from his second wife. This is going to be the mother of his child, Atavia. And she says that she gave a lot of interviews in this book. She's also in the documentary. She's like, this is the last time i'm speaking about this publicly um this is the reason i bring this to your attention because this is 2005 and he's mentioning suicide uh so it says on our first date he actually told me right after his marriage ended that he was in saint martin and he was suicidal he rented a car and he was driving in the middle of the night on these

really tiny roads going up the hill and he's like you know what if i die here i don't care and that's one of probably 10 maybe a dozen examples that i've found of him. And he always said, that was the first time I've heard about driving off a cliff, because he usually mentioned hanging himself, which is the route he ultimately chose. core he's romantic he like fantasized about having a normal life kid wife kid white picket fence kind of thing uh that's the his words not mine when he met atavia there was a shift his general attitude towards life change his cynicism was a bit tempered and the conversations wouldn't necessarily twist towards the darkest quickly he seemed very happy and anytime you're going to change there's going to be some people in your life that maybe you don't, like they don't stay in your life anymore or something changes. So a lot of examples of him kind of just drifting away from friends of his previous life. And, you know, even tell some cases like you just, you guys don't get me. You don't understand me. I've heard him say this on

the show with, with, uh, people he's interviewing. Uh, David Chang is another example of that. There's a, there's a, there's a episode where they're in New York and they talk about, you know, David Chang went through a similar experience of now I'm a really famous chef. And I go back and try to talk to my old friends and I just – we can't relate to it. And so Tony would say some messed up things like, you guys don't get me. Like Eric Rippey gets me and Mario gets me and Batali and all these other people. And this is Sam, one of his friends and somebody he worked with for a long time, and also the former junkie. And he, this is what he says is like, not only do we get you, but we made you. And so he's like, this is not true. But this is really the point I want to bring to your attention is that the resourcefulness and the discipline of a junkie applied to

something productive. And so he says, even though we didn't really talk anymore, I was so proud of him and the discipline he developed. I don't know where the fuck that came from. And so I think that's a great illustration of this. What I'm trying to convey to you is he literally had two different lives. It's a different person. Now he took some of the experiences he had in his previous life, his extensive knowledge of working in a kitchen for 20 years, his extensive knowledge of film and literature, and took that and uses those ideas as tools to be really successful as his second life. But he's saying, I don't know where that came from. Like he was extremely disciplined.

This is more maybe that, again, maybe personality traits. At least I say they're surprising. Because somebody I thought I'd studied further closely. Extremely socially awkward. And then you see that his approach, his addiction, he took his work extremely seriously. So it says it would take years for Tony to make direct eye contact and say people's names. That all came from his extreme social anxiety. He said later on in life, because he got way too famous,

he also developed agoraphobia, which is like a fear of public places, fear of leaving your house. Towards the end of his life, he didn't want to go anywhere. Most of his last, like he would communicate through Instagram stories. And almost all the time,

it was just him in a hotel room alone, him in his apartment in New York alone. He was quite observant. So he talks about like the people that he'd want to be around where people like him uh he says i took my job very seriously eat sleep dream the job and tony appreciated that it's how he approached his shows the line between tony and the show was very thin if it existed at all and i think that resonated with people that watched his show and consumed the work that he created. It reminded me of a great quote that I learned from Coco Chanel

in the last biography I read of her. She says, it's immoral to play at one's living. Later on, Tony sends an email and he says, the greatest sin is aspiring to mediocrity. Another quote that Tony says, I think think is one of his most famous quotes is that your body is not a temple it's an amusement park you should enjoy the ride and this said this one sentence of the book reminded me that Tony respected the willingness to take physical risks to create risks the desires to be out there on the edge and to have experiences go back to the idea the the fact that the separation, the line between himself and his show is almost non-existent.

Most shows, Tony realized, and that's why he made fun of it, they're just not authentic. And so he was very decisive. He stood by what he believed in. He was smart. He knew who he was. He knew what he wanted from the show, and he delivered. It was clear that he had a vision for it, and the vision reflected who he was he knew what he wanted from the show and he delivered it was clear that he had a vision for it and the vision in the vision reflected who he was and that is not the case with most of the people on television so what i wrote in the book as i got here i thought about

because i'd also in my mind i'd just recently seen a clip of uh the restaurant he worked at in manhattan when after he died Lael, turned into like a shrine. You saw this when Steve Jobs died, how people would send flowers and notes and stuff at the Apple stores. And you can read some of them about the letters people wrote to Tony after he died about the impact he had on their lives. And I wrote, it's like some broadcaster, right? Think about everybody else that's on network TV. If these people died, if they died, do you think there would be an outpouring of grief

like there was when Tony died? And I think the obvious answer to that is no, there just absolutely would not be. The fact that there was almost a non-existent line between himself and the product he created, I think is what helped him resonate with so many people. They felt like they knew him. And so now we just get examples of this crazy range of experiences,

life experiences that he's having during this time. And this is what I was mentioning earlier. It's like this is all this life full of priceless memories is really all that we're going to have. Think about what Ben Franklin knew. He said this 300 years ago, that don't squander time because time is the stuff that life is made of. How you're spending your time is the most important thing in your life because it is your life. So this is David Chang saying, there was a whirlwind of Bourdain around these years in my early 30s. I think Tony took a shine to me because he saw a lot of me in him and I idolized him. Some of the best moments of my life were with that guy. The

best hang, man, drinking drinking smoking tony was the fucking best there was a five-year stretch where more often than not tony was going to be there and we were hanging out a lot and getting blind drunk together and smoking so many cigarettes almost all of it to check this out almost all of our conversations were based on happiness and the elusiveness of it and so chang talks about one of the best nights they ever had together i forgot i think they're in spain somewhere they're at like uh they're at some culinary conference and all the people in their industry and all the people they know are there and he says it was me he's gonna list a bunch of every chef so i'm gonna skip over that it was me every chef who was at

the conference tony was there and it's packed and tony and tony and i were like we don't want to go to this fucking dinner they make you go to all these dinner junkets and we're drinking these giant gin and tonics trying to get out of out of it but we couldn't i to go to this fucking dinner. They make you go to all these dinner junkets, and we're drinking these giant gin and tonics, trying to get out of it, but we couldn't. I do think it was the best dinner I've ever had in my life. Everything we ate, and I remember we were drunk, but we were just eating it with our hands, and the whole thing was magic.

It was like amazing cheeses and lobsters and everything you'd want to eat at that moment in time. I remember looking around at the room at Tony, and there was just utter fucking joy. I remember saying, even the most jaded cynical motherfucker can be knocked on their ass and at the time I didn't think there was any more anyone more jaded and cynical than Tony and he said too this is the best meal and the reason I bring that up is because in the book in the documentary in these interviews you see that

people are devastated the fact that he died they don't have their friend anymore but inevitably what they talk about is they'll talk about the suicide for a little bit they don't they talk about the memories do you remember that one time we were in spain do you remember the time we were in nashville do you remember a time where we're here and we were doing this that is and that makes your friend your loved ones that pass on immortal. You get to keep those memories, those pictures, the videos, everything they have from these experiences. In this chapter, David does say that travel, how travel changed. David Chang does say how travel changed Tony. And he says all that travel made him worldly and wise. I think he saw that things are relatively meaningless.

I think that travel was him running away. Every new culture, every new TV project was to fill the heroin void. The more he traveled, the more he saw the pain and suffering of it all. It gave him deep, deep humanity. But I think it fucked him up even more. And then this goes back to this idea of just filling your life with as much experience as possible, as much life as possible. There's just a great line in the book that I want to read to you. This life isn't a green room for something else. He went for it. And so that is

written after he dies. Now, 20 years before he dies, he does that show, Cook's Tour, that I told you about. If you watch the intro to that show, it was very interesting. So we talk about, you and I talk about this idea all the time. I got from Mark Andreessen, I think it's in the book, Hard Thing, Hard Thing About Hard Things. So his partner, Ben Horowitz, they're talking, this is like 25 years ago, something like that. They're young, younger versions of themselves. They're in a startup. And Mark sends to Ben something. And he's like, you know what I love about startups? And Ben's like, what? He's like, you only feel two emotions, euphoria or terror. And so anybody doing something difficult knows exactly what Mark is talking about. It's like you have the highest highs, but then you have the lowest lows,

and there's almost nothing in between. I feel that's a way that Tony Bourdain lived his life. There's almost like a bipolarness, unfortunately, to this all. And in his first show, he talks about in the intro, it's like a 20, 30-second intro. There's a like a bipolar-ness, unfortunately, to this all. And in his first show, he talks about, in the intro, it's like a 20, 30 second intro, there's a line here, I wrote it down, says, I hope to have a few epiphanies around the world, and I'm willing to go to some lengths to do that. I'm looking for extremes of emotion and experience. I'll try anything, I'll risk everything. And that line, I'm looking for

extremes of emotion and experience. That is euphoria and terror. He had some of the greatest experiences a human being could have. And he also had some of the worst. And unfortunately, there's very little in the middle. And part of that is the way he approached his life. This life isn't a green room for something else. Go for it. The interview I watched right before sitting down to talk to you is he talks about so he talks about what desire to hang himself in his hotel room in sicily uh this is the sicily parts unknown episode you see him flip out on the episode if you've seen the episode it says in sicily he kind of had a mental breakdown on the shoot i'm giving you some background because

this is about i want to say about three years before he actually does it it was also his birthday and he'd almost reached the age that his dad was when he died, and it got dark. He went really into a funk, and he said that he hadn't expected, because he said he hadn't expected to live beyond that age. He was having breathing difficulties, so full-on panic attack. These are, I'm not, like, this is serious. Like, he needed help. He was having breathing difficulties. He was suffering from anxiety. We got him an oxygen tank. We were truly worried about him, worried about his health for his mental state, and there was a day when he just sat in the garden and he wouldn't film anything. And part of this, when you study him, you realize that he

wanted to quit his show. He liked doing it, but the toll, the cost was too much. It destroyed his first marriage. It destroys his second marriage. He didn't want to destroy his last relationship. It alienates and doesn't allow him to spend time with his daughter who he truly did love and this is what i mean it's just like there's multiple periods in his life where they're talking about hey i'm just gonna sell everything go to saint martin and be a beach bomb and live a truly happy life or i'm gonna quit doing the show or i'm gonna do something different or whatever the case is it's just like he got the idea he got to the edge but he wouldn't step over that and so I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna read this to you and then this made me think of somebody

who who successfully navigated what Tony I feel failed to do I asked for the fame I asked to be the big guy and now I'm accountable to and the reason he didn't do this because now it's not just his own living he's got 15 20 people his crew, all these people that make money and their livelihoods depend on him. I asked to be the big guy. Now I'm accountable to this huge group of people and I have to do a really good job and I have to be Anthony Bourdain all the time. I chose this. And this is the cost and the price. And so they're having this conversation.

Somebody asked him, I says, is it worth it? And he says, some days it and he says some days yeah others uh and so out of the 220 biographies or whatever the number is now that i've read out of every single person when i say like the one person that is i consider my blueprint and i gotta reread the book because now it's it's ed thorpe a man for all markets i think it's number 93 maybe 99 something like that but you. I've done over 100 since then. He's probably the only person that did not over-optimize. He was extremely successful, extremely smart, extremely financially successful. He lived a life of adventure.

He was a good husband. He was a good father. He took care of his health. He's still alive. I don't mean to speak about him in past tense. He identified the handful of other areas, health, personal relationships, parenthood, whatever that is. And Ed Thorpe got it right. And so I want to read this. This comes from A Man of All Markets. The foreword was written by Nassim Taleb.

And the note I left myself when I took notes of this is this is another lesson that Taleb learned from Thorpe. Own your life. Don't create wealth by losing control of your life. So this is Taleb writing about Thorpe. Some additional wisdom I personally learned from Thorpe. Many successful speculators after their first big break in life get involved in large scale structures. This is exactly what happened to Tony, okay? This is why I'm bringing it to your attention. After the first big break in life, get involved in large scale structures with multiple offices, morning meetings, coffee, corporate intrigues, building more wealth while losing control of their lives. Not Ed. After the separation from his partners and the closing of his firm, for reasons that had nothing to do with him, he did not start a new mega fund. He limited his

involvement in managing other people's money. But such restraint requires some intuition, some self-knowledge. It is vastly less stressful to be independent and one is never independent when involved in a large structure with powerful clients. It is hard enough to deal with the intricacies of probabilities you need to avoid the vagaries of exposure to human moods. True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one's activities for peace of mind. Tony Bourdain never had peace of mind, ever. Thorpe certainly learned a lesson. The most stressful job he ever had was running the math department at the University of California, California Irvine. You can detect, you can, this is maybe the most important sentence in the whole thing what Nassim is writing to us. You can detect that the man is in control of his life. This explains why he looked younger the

second time I saw him in 2016 than he did the first time in 2005. And it's just absolutely amazing. I'm going to reread that book soon. And if you haven't read it, I'd order it immediately. Man for All Markets, autobiography by Ed Dorp dorp absolutely fantastic let's go back to so he's doing reservations about two parts unknown and he's got all this this is more of this this contentious relationship between the their mom and the the two bourdain brothers this is his brother writing it drove both me and tony crazy that our mother just seemed convinced that my son is now prestigious and famous and making a lot of money so i deserve to for to have him give me all sorts of money. There was also always some story about why she was out a huge sum of money.

Tony would get an email like, hey, I need $50,000 in dental work. And this is just more about the fact that she was crazy. There was one dinner that we had that where she, so it's dinner at dinners, the mom and the two sons. There was one dinner we had where she presented the grand plan that Tony and I were going going to bail her out i had found out a few months earlier that she had falsified my signature on a document and had basically yanked our dad's ashes out of the place where we had them stored she was technically still his wife because they never divorced but they had separated and lived and his his father got like in a relationship, even though she had basically kicked him out,

she had convinced herself, wrongly, that he had forgiven her and that they should have their ashes scattered together. So just having her plop down that night at some restaurant and say, this is what you're going to do for me, you'll buy me an apartment and you'll give me a stipend. I think Tony's jaw dropped and I went kind of ballistic about the ashes and the forging of the signature i said that's the shittiest thing you've ever done you should be ashamed of yourself

i was saying ashamed of yourself she walked out in a huff tony and i stayed and had dinner um and then towards the end of his life there's this writer named patrick that is writing this in-depth i think it's a new yorker i'm pretty sure it's an article in the new yorker that comes out i actually read it it comes out uh came out excuse me it came out uh 2000 end of 2000 maybe november 2017 and he killed himself june 2018 so less than a year before he died if i i i think i have those dates correctly and so he's having these conversations i think this is really important it's like slowing down and asking like what am i chasing like why am i do i know why i'm doing what i'm doing um and then why keep going if you're lonely and it's a burden and you have all these other opportunities like you're a writer you could write books you don't have to travel 250 days a year

he had opportunities to um have his own show on sirius xm like a podcast like an interview show or whatever the case is like you were talented he's talented he's just an interesting person it doesn't matter if he's writing if he's he had a very successful lecture business where he'd go and sell you know 30,000 tickets at a theater just to hear him to spend a night with him talk he had all other means of supporting himself because you had other people that were interested they just you were an interesting person you know whether that's coming through on radio whether it's coming through on writing books but it's coming through lectures you don't have to destroy yourself like this I asked about him about a half a dozen times over the

year, what are you chasing? Why do you keep doing it? Why don't you slow down? He had shifting explanations. For a guy who was so adept at diagnosing himself, none of his explanations were very persuasive. He says, to me, the most persuasive answer came from Eric Repair when he said, I think Tony keeps moving because he's afraid of what would happen if he stopped so several times over the last few years he has this idea it's like okay well how can i keep doing this but not be away so long and they came up with an idea where we could shoot an entire season 30 days which is a lot different and so he almost had a way out and yet is messed up because the the chairman of cbs or the ceo of cbs at the time let less moon vase uh just says something that tony doesn't like so it says he was pushing pushing for us to come up with another contract that would take less time

way less time to shoot uh he says we can shoot they figured out a way it's called have knife we'll travel he's like here look we can shoot this entire season in 30 days we went went into the meeting at CBS with Les Moves. Les says, OK, I like this. Then he said, just so you know, this is CBS. This is the big time. Anything less than eight million viewers is going to be considered a failure. We shook hands and then we went out to the street. Tony lit two cigarettes at the same time. And he said, eight million people? No way. I don't need that kind of pressure. I don't need someone up my ass like that all the time. He killed it, meaning he killed that idea.

And what I thought of, like there's a lot in this last week, and I don't know if I did a good enough job on that, honestly. But describing the bureaucracy, like the big company, big institution, big organization bureaucracy that Johan Cruyff had to deal with. There's a lot of that same thing in the book where you just have these these it's no wonder why netflix is kicking all these guys asses because they just don't understand like they think they know better than the people actually making the product and so all i thought about was reading this book i was like man if tony he's just five years maybe 10 years too early because if you um and I might actually, there's been a few listeners that have recommended, I think there's two books now. There's one by Reed Hastings about the days of Netflix

and then another one by his co-founder, I can't remember his name, but he wrote a book about the early days of Netflix too that I might cover because it's a lot of, I mean, it's very interesting. Not only have I been a subscriber to them for like, I don't know, over a decade. I mean, I've been subscribing since they were sending me DVDs in the mail, for's very interesting. Not only have I been a subscriber to them for like, I don't know, over a decade. I mean, I've been subscribing since they were sending me DVDs in the mail, for God's sake.

But so obviously, like, I believe in their business model. I think what they're doing is interesting. And I think they're super smart. But what I've heard from people that sell products, sell their shows or whatever to Netflix is Netflix just completely hands off. They're like, OK, I like that show. I'm buying it. They don't sit there and call you up and be like, oh, change this sequence or, you know, edit this, which Tony hated. It's like, you know, Steve Jobs said the reason he didn't want like to be second guessed by executives or even focus groups, he's like, use it like, would you tell? It's like grabbing the brush from this is such a

Steve Jobs thing to think, but grabbing the brush from Pablo Picasso and just adding brush strokes. So he's like, oh, get out of here. Like you would never do something like that. And so all I was thinking is like, you would never hear somebody from Netflix. Oh, we need 8 million viewers. This thing would be considered a failure, whatever the case is. And like Tony had one of the best, even today, like people still watch this. I've talked to people, didn't even know, like they see his show on TV.

They thought maybe he's still alive and still making it. But Netflix would have been the perfect or any of that. I mean, I guess Jeff Bezos and Amazon, other people might have done this. But that approach that you see now, it's just like, no, we buy the content. You know, we sell the content on a subscription basis to our customers, but we're not going to tell you what to do. That would have been the perfect match for Tony. And this stupid little comment is like, oh, this is the big time.

Anything less than 8 million viewers is going to be considered a failure. Not that when he said that he knew, couldn't possibly know what would happen if Tony continued down the path he was on. But this part of the book jumped out to me. It's just like, oh, you see that little crack in the door, that little light.

It's like, oh, he might have had a way out. Still get to produce television that he believed in, that he loved, and then have also a life. It's just a missed opportunity. It's just sad. One thing to learn from Tony that's positive is this

idea that you'd be a yardstick of quality. Most people are not used to an environment where excellence is expected and tony was you know his the crew loved him but he was extremely hard on them he says he demanded excellence and he never settled for shit he just wanted the show to be the greatest thing ever all the time and that's like this obsessive nature this this addictiveness this like clearly he loves and he has sold the game these are the people that make the best products the coco chanels the edwin lands the enzo ferraris they all they're they're that there's a lot of traits that anthony bourdain shared with people like that he demanded excellence he never

settled for shit he just wanted the show to be the greatest thing ever all the time no one ever got compliments for tony and even that that uh and even that wasn't he's talking about he was surprised because like oh it's good he said it's good to have you around you should stay and so he's one of the producers on the show i think it's actually a camera guy he says no one ever got compliments for tony and even that wasn't really a compliment it was like don't leave you're useful which was probably as big as compliment as you're ever going to get from him and And so we have this complete dedication to his craft. And then, you know, another trait that is maybe less than good, especially in hindsight, wasn't good.

He's addicted to chaos. After he died, everyone was saying rest in peace, but Tony didn't enjoy peace. He loved, he says, he loved, I wouldn't say conflict, but energy. He was attracted to chaos. On set, he would even instill it. This is more about him, the way he worked. A lot of this obviously is going to come from, from editors, from crew members,

from producers, from cameramen, from directors. They give us a really good insight into how he worked. This is something that, you know, there's no like wishy-washiness in his communication. It's like he, you always knew it was crystal clear about what he wanted. He preferred clear communication. And I think anybody can appreciate that in an environment that they work in. Like you don't want this passive aggressiveness or this like meandering language. Just communicate clearly. We're on a team here. Let's try to figure this out. If Tony loves something, he would tell you.

And if he hated it, he would tell you that too. He wouldn't dick around. He would give you a straight up answer. And sometimes that would really sting because it would be an uppercut. But those of us who stayed with it a long time, you would just know not to take anything personally. It was his life's work and he never slacked. He would never miss a deadline. It would always be in your inbox that morning. He loved deadlines. So now we're about two years before he dies. And this is the sad thing.

So maybe let's say let's say the last three years of his life, the two years. So he had two years where he cleans up his act. He stopped smoking. He gets really good habits. He gets in shape. He gets, becomes addicted. He switches his addiction now his addiction is to jujitsu and training and being healthy. And then the last year, so you have two years of good, good addiction. Then the last year, that addiction is pointed in a different direction, which is his relationship with Asia Argento. And she's a terrible person. Everybody in this book

and everybody in the documentary hates her. And they were warning about her for a long time. But this is about, I remember what Johan Cruyz said he's like when he he you know he died of lung cancer realized too late like your bad your hat your bad habits have consequences and you're not going to escape those consequences tony did something smart he he he he changed his behaviors and started optimizing for health and it was was somewhat happier as a result of that so this is one of the directors on Parts Unknown.

The fucking smoking, man, and the exhaustion, and the travel, really racked up a heavy line of credit over the years. There were times when we'd be out on a hike on a shoot, and I'd be like, who has the defibrillator? Because I had Tony on mic, and I could hear him wheezing, and I could hear him coughing. And this is something I'm super aware of. I just saw my dad for Thanksgiving and I know I don't have much time left with him because he's been smoking a pack, two packs a day for 35 years.

And he just will not, refuses to quit. The coughing, the wheezing, it's just, I know what is coming. And so I've been trying, like, I'm not going to make the same mistake Ieezing it's just I know what is coming and so I've been trying like I'm not going to make the same mistake I did before my mom died I was like I'm trying to talk to him as much as possible spend as much time with him as possible take pictures and videos and ask him about his life and write everything down um because there's no you know there's just no I've been trying to get him to quit smoking cigarettes for two decades he's just no it would have happened you see i'm saying here like it would have happened already by now and so at this point i'm faced with a choice like what like do i keep

nagging about it like alienate our relationship is like he's he's a grown man he's going to do what he wants to do regardless of anything I say. And I can say, hey, you got two beautiful grandkids. Excuse me, three beautiful grandkids. Like, you know, they like spend time with you. Like, don't you want to see more of this? But that's really, I mean, if that's not persuasive enough, I don't know what is. So hearing about this and the fact that he did stop smoking temporarily, Anthony Bourdain, that is, and then he picks it right back up. You have to be really – the note of myself and constant reminder of this lesson I took away from this book that I've not only talked to myself about but talked to other people as I've been reading this book is, man, you've got to be careful who you keep around you and who you let influence you.

Because they're going to – even if you're on a subconscious level, whatever it is, everybody around you is going to influence you because they're going to even if you're on a subconscious level whatever it is everybody around you is going to influence you and this is always a dangerous dangerous person and a manipulative person that you let into your inner circle that you you you gave your entire world to and the book is going to go into a lot more detail than i will it's just it's not a good we're not there yet so let me let me go to the fact that he finds a healthy obsession i guess i want his his his wife he i don't think they ever got divorced um atavia because even when they were like they lived together with their daughter and they were the romantic element of the relationship ended but they were still like

friends and raising their daughter and then asia is gonna be like no you need to move out no you can't post about your family anymore and like she's completely controlled his life but it says octavia gets into jujitsu and her passion anything anything that somebody's passionate about it's like it has it can be infectious in nature you know i have one of my oldest friends like addicted to snowboarding he moved across the country just so he could be close to the mountain and his enthusiasm and energy for it's like oh i want to learn how to snowboard and i actually took snowboarding lessons so like oh i could see why i totally get why you like this so it says maybe i should have have uh this is octavia maybe i should have my close friends and family try

jujitsu and write about that and tony tried it and he really liked it he really wanted to do it so then he starts being addicted he would anywhere he would travel in the world he'd have to train jujitsu in the morning and if you're getting up really early in the morning that means that the night before you're not going to be, you know, drinking as much as possible because anything that's going to interfere with your training kind of gets pushed to the side. He was always making sure that when we were going on shoots that there was a gym and he had time for training. If he couldn't train, he was not happy. And if there was no jiu-jitsu club and he made people on the crew train with him, even if they weren't trained. So if there's no jiu-jitsu club, then the case would be, okay, let's just beat the shit out of each other until we're exhausted. He made people on the crew train with him, even if they weren't trained. So if there's no jiu-jitsu club, then the case would be, okay, let's just beat the shit out of each other until we're exhausted.

That would always get him in a really great mood. He was a very intense dude, and he found the sport that matched his personality. His ability to go from zero to 100 like that. And so this idea of that, the benefit of rigorous physical activity as a way to like lighten your move and make you happier is not this is a very old idea. Greek philosophers talked about it. There's a quote on my I always say on my phone, I read the autobiography of Nelson Mandela a long time ago. And as far as stressful lives, Nelson Mandela is up there, right? And he says, my main interest was in training. I found the rigorous exercise to be an excellent outlet for tension and stress. After a strenuous workout, I felt both mentally and physically lighter. And so Tony was experiencing the benefits of that. He says, the same way I used to wait online to score heroin, I'd be at the dojo waiting for it

to open. He said he was trying to use that kind of addiction mentality for something else. When you have that kind of personality, it's all encompassing and it reaches into every nook and cranny of your being and so this is where we got to the point where his life is this is the last year of his life starts to turn really bad and the no of myself is what i just told you and it's really no to myself be careful who you allow around you they influence you there was a peak period where he seemed happy that addictive personality was just all focused on jiu-jitsu he looked great he had all this energy at one point at the end of a scene he almost hugged me and i was like what the hell he's not that kind of person and then fucking what's-her-name enters his life and he starts smoking

again and he just sort of got back into that negative energy that fit into this weird fantasy character character that he felt that he was and then this is his wife even though like they're living together not you know he married but they're like friends they're raising kids right she says he went back into his old vices he went back to smoking every day and drinking more than he was when he was at home with us those things don't really make you feel like get going training in morning. And he was serious about training. He was addicted to jiu-jitsu. He competed in jiu-jitsu tournaments. Again, you can't show up early to train, and that's a good hack to have good habits. Like I can't get drunk the night before because I have to wake up at 6 to work out.

And I know once I do this, I'm going to feel great for the rest of my day. And so this idea, those things don't really make you feel like going to train in the morning. And so she's going back, Octavia, who's who's living i mean obviously he's traveling a lot but they're living together at this point he's eventually going to move out because ajay requested that and again i'm not like he's the one that killed himself but it doesn't help that you have a terrible person around you and manipulating you so this is atavia he really fell into he felt he really felt this responsibility to be healthy. He started actually getting checkups and going to the doctor. This is before he goes down this

bad path. He had a CAT scan of his lungs and it turns out that they were totally fine. He was making an effort to be healthy because he wanted to be around for Arianne. That's his daughter. But then once he moved out, he seemed to be really impulsive. Definitely for the last two years of his life, he made many impulsive decisions. When he told me he wanted to move out, that was not a big shock. For quite some time, we were basically friends. We didn't work out as a married couple, but we would get along so well. There was no reason for either of us to move out or to change the way things were. We were doing really well as a family. But then he fell in love and his girlfriend told him that she didn't want to be a weekend lover. So he decided it was the

best thing for his relationship to move out. He told me nothing is going to change. I'll be there every morning to take her to school and I'll be there for dinner and I'll sleep over a lot of nights. And for a bit, it really seemed like things were going to work out, but then everything changed and that's not the way they went. And when I got to this point, I'm close to 500 pages into this book and the note of myself is just something I just absolutely will never allow to happen. And I wrote, Aja. He allowed Aja to destroy his family. And that's where you're sad and disappointed in this person that you really admire. But you can't let this happen.

I'm married and I hope to be married for the rest of my life. But if I wasn't and I was dating somebody new and they asked me to choose between them and my daughter that'd be the last time we ever spoke I would never speak to that person again and the book goes in less detail than the documentary does but Octavia says in there she's like he even had like Tony call me one day said please stop posting because they're still family please stop posting pictures of me and Arianne on your page because it makes asia insecure and you just put yourself and try to put yourself in his shoes you get a call from your girlfriend and she says this i hang up and never talk to you again ever this is now his long-term agent talking you know

these people tony had there was a degree of loyalty that he chucked away at the end, which is shocking. But he had people around him for many, many decades, including Kimberly Witherspoon, which is who I'm about to read to you from. I'm not, like, this is not something, like, this is something the people that were closest to him were warning him about this woman. I'm not sure how much he could hear the increasing apprehension that we felt for his safety, his judgment, and his emotional and psychological well-being in his romantic relationships. I was trying to get him to see that he had as many life choices and that his choices weren't as limited as he seemed to think they were. Once he became involved with Aja, many of us were voicing our worry directly about that relationship. And goes on i'm not going to read all of it but this is multiple people over many many pages everyone around him the main point i'm trying to get across

here is everyone around him saw that she was trouble and this is i mean this is a such an extreme example of something that's probably really common like i think a lot of people have had friends that were dating someone it's like like that person, that girl, that man, that dude, whatever. That person's not good for you and they cannot see it. You can be best friends with them forever and they have to be the ones to discover that. And in many cases, you even see like they don't, they know it's bad and they keep going back. The extreme example of this is obviously because this is going to end in suicide and the destruction of a life and of a human being that was so loved by so many people it's just

it's so hard to read this the last year of tony's life was really tough for me to watch because he was saying this thing uh that was like you know i put myself way out there and i could totally be destroyed by tomorrow so that's one person here's another example this is Allison, the person I mentioned earlier. He did say, describing this relationship that he was in, it's going to end so badly. This was at the beginning of their relationship. He was smart. He was smart enough to know that he was in a dangerous place. Then back to another person. He genuinely heard from me and from others that her behavior seemed to me and others to be dysfunctional and disruptive and destabilizing but i think he thought it was manageable he said i hear you i think you're

probably right this is going to end very very badly but i but it will have been a hell of a ride and i will be fine and part of it is that attraction to have a hell of a ride in in tony's words whether or not like it it might end bad and i'll have pain after but it's going to be a ride and another extreme experience is when that's exactly what he was after there's just a there's just some one-liners in this book that are just amazing this is one of them tony gorged himself on being alive so at this point he tries to quit again he meets with uh his two partners the people you know three people started tony's television career himself and the two founders of 0.0 production and so you know he's like that's it like i'm done he has to meet at

the bar and he says his opening salvo was look guys every good band eventually breaks up they just come to an end of their run it's better that we go our separate ways. And I think we've reached that point. So then he said, we're done. It's over. Chris and I were like, OK, we got it. Tony said, I just want to go away. I want to live in Italy.

Lydia said, we support you. Put your jacket on, get up, and go. He stood up, put his jacket on, and stood there. They kept arguing. This is Lydia, one of his partners, saying, I said to him, you're full of shit. You're yelling at us that the nature of our business and what we're doing is preventing you from going and to be happy now. He wanted to quit the show, move to Italy and grow old with Asia. That's what he said.

You're yelling at us the nature of our business and what you're doing is preventing you from going to be happy now. I said, you're completely in command of your own destiny. If you really want to go, why are you standing there? So eventually, it's the same thing we saw. He's like, I can go to St. Martin and live as a beach bum. I can do like, he gets to the edge and doesn't go. And that part reminded me of in George Lucas's fantastic biography that I read a long time ago.

He talks about this idea about people being in cages with open doors. Let me read this quote from you from his biography to you. It was the importance of self and being able to step out of whatever you're in and move forward rather than being stuck in your little rut. Lucas explained, people would give anything to quit their jobs. All they have to do is do it. They're people in cages with open doors. And then there's a scene in the book that's also in the documentary where David Chang starts crying thinking about this. And it's something that Tony said to him one of the last times they saw each other. I was at a crossroads in my life. I told Tony I wanted to figure out how to start a family. I would love to be a father. And he said

to me, you're going to be a horrible father. You're going to fuck it up just like I did. I know he didn't say up just like I did I know he didn't say that to hurt me I know that it was him projecting but that crushed me then he went right back on right back to talking about Aja and I'm like what the fuck is happening and so now he's gonna start involving her in his work and the way I would put this is and you hear this from the people that worked with them for a long time, they're in their writing and in their interviews, is you have this tight crew that have been working for over a decade together, traveling the world. They have an idea. Remember, they went from

this idea started with a cook's tour, then morphed into No Reservations and Parts Unknown. So it's called different things, depending on what network they are or what they're doing but it's really the same idea and it's this hey we have an idea and let's keep working and molding it together to what this thing can become and so we're an extremely tight-knit group you have all these crazy extreme experiences all over the world and now you're having your girlfriend come in and start bossing us around giving telling us no like this is not the way to do it requesting that you fire people that have worked for you for 12 years and screaming in the background it's either me or him when you're on the phone and you comply

with this so from that perspective like imagine coming into a company that's been running for a while you're now the ceo or the you know the director's kind of the ceo if i know it's not so from that perspective like imagine coming into a company that's been running for a while you're now the ceo or the you know the director's kind of the ceo if i know it's not the greatest analogy but you're coming in as a director and then you just completely destroy everything that they worked on the reason i want to preface everything i'm about to read you with this is the response from these people is completely predictable. The response from the crew is completely predictable. And so they obviously say very bad things about her. This is an example.

Her influence on the whole thing. It was Yoko Ono in the Beatles, in a Beatles recording session. She didn't bring anything to the table. And this is where you just see terrible behavior by by somebody you admire he's about to fire one of his closest camera the people he worked with a cameraman that he worked for for 12 years and you know this had to be devastating because this guy refused to be um interviewed for this book tony called me a couple times that night drunk. He told me back to drinking, smoking, doing all again, people around you are going to influence you.

Aja was a terrible influence on him. He told me that I had to send Zach home that night and I could hear her in the background just screaming. It's him or me. It's me or him. Pressuring this guy to fire one of his friends. Tony knew that this move it's like you can never see this person again. You have to fuck up his job

get him fired and make him embarrassed for the rest of his life. And so he does it, and everybody talks about, like everybody's in the crew is now like, wait a minute. If you're willing to fire, you know, there's inevitable some kind of hierarchy in any kind of team or organization. So this guy is like right here, one of your favorite favorite people one of the most experienced people somebody we worked with for over a decade and you're willing to fire him because your girlfriend says you have to then none of us are safe so what have we actually worked with you and made sacrifices to build with you what do we have now we have nothing and so it says he turned to me and said i had to do it it was the first time he had ever said anything like that to me he's like i had no choice i love

her and then this is from their perspective from the people you work with perspective what do you think like what's the conclusion they're going to come to we were like a family at that point people had been with him for so many years but now we were all of a sudden expendable if his girlfriend hates us and so everything i'm describing you is happening in this hong kong episode of parts unknown it's actually one of the it was it was an episode released after he dies it's one of the last full episodes they did um but ajia was the one directing it because the director had uh at the last minute had like have an emergency gallbladder removed and so tony talked to everybody and he's like oh it would be great if my girlfriend did this and then they realized oh wow she's

completely manipulating him. So they get back with a shoot and he approaches another producer and he said he was thanking me for putting together the band along with arranging a couple of other things. I'm like, what band? What are you talking about? I hadn't done none of this. That was all another producer named Helen Cho. Whatever work Helen had done, he thought I had done because Asia was trying to maneuver Helen out of her position with Tony. Never before was there a deliberate attempt at misinformation. And then just another opinion on somebody else in the crew. And you see Tony on film at this time.

He's never been happier in his life. They have plans. He's now constantly involving her in his work. He's in love with her. She's scheduled to direct another episode. I think like a month after he winds up killing himself. And while they're filming in France. Tony's doing an episode in France

with his friend Eric Ripert. There's tabloids that publish all these pictures of while he's in France of Asia with another man. I think they're walking around Rome, if I remember correctly, holding hands, hugging, spending the night together at a hotel, kissing, all that stuff. And so it becomes worldwide news

because Tony was very very very public about his relationship with Asia he would post about her all the time talk about her all the time and so you know you have the super famous person that is now getting cheated on in front of everybody and so the tabloids start calling him for comment because they're going to publish there's now there's American tabloids calling him for comment because they're going to publish stories and they've had people follow her around the city and basically document what's happening. And this is where when I'm about to read you, I don't this might be the most shocking thing that I learned about this. And I didn't learn about it until I read the book and watched the documentary. So he would communicate through Instagram stories and it wasn't him talking he would show what he's

looking at and then pick music and so now we have the his producer and longtime friend Helen Cho describe what we actually saw on his last Instagram story he was still posting Instagram stories of empty hotel rooms with soundtracks from films. He was telling about what had just happened, the tabloid pictures that came out. He posted a story with music from the film Violent City. It is a very ominous soundtrack. It is a revenge film, a story about betrayal and revenge. The beginning of that movie is, I it's charles bronson it's a tabloid

pictures of a lover being unfaithful and then that lover taking revenge so tony's mood turns extremely dark obviously it's going to be apparent to the people you're working with the director goes over to him and he says, we're at this old French monastery. The meal is fine. And then I remember it vividly. After the meal, he's looking over this valley. It's just idyllic, beautiful. And he's smoking a cigarette.

I go out there and I say, are you all right, man? He says to me, a little fucking discretion. That's all I ask. And I was like, whoa, man, I just want to make sure you're, he says, no, not you, her. I don't want to be on the cover of these tabloids and answer people's questions. That's all he said. And that's the last time I talked to him. They find him in the hotel the next day.

And the rest of the book is his friends just sharing the devastation that they feel that he did this. And it goes on for quite a while. He says, listen, if you're in the best mood, if you're in a great place, and this person you deeply love cheats on you, and you're just a regular person, and only five people know, it's fucking awful. He not only got cheated on, he got cheated on and 10 million people are going to know tomorrow the social pressure of that makes it super easy to put a rope on that beam and to jump off that table and then you have other people that just don't believe that that was that person that they knew i didn't believe that tony had the ability to do what he did i did not see him possessing that kind of facility to end it himself he He just wasn't that guy. And I don't even know who that guy is, but I knew who my friend Tony was. And then another example, I think he was profoundly hurt

and profoundly disappointed and profoundly humiliated. And he probably had a moment of epiphany that he had just fucking leveraged his whole life, his reputation, his words, his family, his money. I think it was just kind of like, I'm done. I'm exhausted. And then the last one. Something changed at the end. I didn't like him as much. I liked him better when he was just kind of living his best life and looking in the rearview mirror like he stole something. This beautiful life that he had. Something people would dream of. And no one else could do it but him.

A slit my wrist love story is just the shittiest ending of it all. The world is not better off with him not here. It's just not. And that is where I'll leave it I highly recommend especially if you're a fan of Tony and you liked his work highly recommend reading the book it might be difficult to get through

but it's worth it it's just an extraordinary life that unfortunately had a terrible ending to it so if you want to buy the book and support the podcast at the same time I'll leave a link in the show notes you can do that if you want to buy a gift subscription or a group subscription if you want to buy the book and support the podcast at the same time, I'll leave a link in the show notes. You can do that. If you want to buy a gift subscription or a group subscription, if you want to buy a bunch of them, I'll leave links below to do that as well. That is 219 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.