The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show 202 Mike Elgan, Author of Gastronomad: The Art of Living Everywhere and Eating Everything

Episode Date: May 6, 2018

Mike Elgan, Author of Gastronomad: The Art of Living Everywhere and Eating Everything [powerpress_playlist]

Hi, this is Foss here from thechrisfossshow.com, thechrisfossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another super live podcast, and we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. You guys are the best audience in the world, and I'm not kidding, even though I'm using someone else's best quote. So anyway, we appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives, dogs, cats, mistresses, pool boys. Hey, get everybody to listen to the show. It's a whole thing, really, when it comes down to it. Play it for your animals.

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Anyway, I have a wonderful guest, Mike Elgin, here today with us. And Mike is a journalist who travels around the world. He recently released his book. We'll get into that. But he writes a popular weekly column for Computer World. He contributes to news and analysts for Fast Company and Security Intelligence. And he writes special features, columns, and think pieces, variety of publications. He's also the newly minted author of Gastronomad, who is the art of living everywhere and eating everything. Welcome to the show, Mike.

How are you doing, bud? I'm doing great. Thanks, Chris. I think we've been trying to do this for about six years. Six years. I've always wanted to have you on the show because you're one of the most interesting people that I follow on Facebook and Instagram. And you post all these great photos of food just all over the world

and these places that you're visiting through your nomadic travels that you've written about in your book and and so there's just beautiful scenery beautiful food and then I see your cute pictures of you and your family and your I believe your granddaughter princess my granddaughter princess squishy face yes she is she is my one and only granddaughter and she is adorable and you know Mike I'm not a real kid person but anytime I see you talking about Princess Squishy Face in the pictures you post, it does kind of get to me where I'm like... We'd be happy to know that she is actually a big dog person. She just...

Oh, cool. And she does have... She's got these little squishy cheeks so I totally see what you mean. Yeah, got them. And I love how you spend time and you travel the world and your family and everything else. So give us some quick plugs where people can look you up and follow you on the internets and the interwebs so they can do that through the show. Yeah, absolutely. So my website is elgan.com, E-L-G-A-N.com. But if you want to zip through all the stuff

and just check out my stuff, subscribe to my RSS feeds and my podcast, all this kind of stuff, just go to elgin.com slash everything. And that is everything. And I do a lot of different stuff. So if you want to just go check it all out, that's the most direct way to get to that stuff you are a master of many trades the other thing is too is your Instagram your Facebook is a nice respite from everything else that's on Facebook where there just seems to be so much contention and everything else and you just have this beautiful peaceful thread of pictures great food cute babies and the world and the world is wonderful again.

Yeah, I save all the vitriol for Twitter. Because every social media. I guess I'm going to watch your Twitter board, find out the other side of you. The dark side of mine. Yeah, I reserve things like political commentary and all that kind of stuff that nobody wants to hear about for Twitter.

And then Facebook is, yeah, it's like family stuff. And Google Plus, I'm still on Google Plus. And I got a bunch of blogs. Yeah. So I think me, and I think I can speak for a lot of people that see your pictures on Facebook, we are innately jealous of your lifestyle. That's why I do it, Chris. Just envy.

I try to create envy in the world. No, that's not. Well, I'll show them this, and they could wish they were on the french riviera no i mean you take beautiful pictures of food uh i i think i've seen you and your wife cooking uh and you guys are really good at preparing meals and you guys actually did inspire me when i went through my weight loss at actually putting the care and time to prepare a good meal and a healthy meal when it comes down to that. So I've seen some of that and that's always been inspiring as well. Yeah, just for the record though, my wife and I have this division of labor.

She makes the food and I eat the food. So we all pitch in and do our part. Note to self, don't do that. in and do our part. She's literally the greatest maker of food in the world. I've seen it. It's really beautiful. I mean, I've seen it and I'm just gone like, wow. Everything I know about food I learned from her basically. So I just totally lucked out. I need to get me a better half. My only problem is I don't really need a better half. I need just somebody who's just better than me because I'm not the best, so I'm not the better.

I don't know where I'm going with that. Let's just grab that. When you say better half, I'm not even sure I make the better part or the best part. So I just need somebody who is me and whatever. I'm just going to leave that word that without the beard exactly yeah i'm actually going with this uh i'm actually toying with this beard thing i'm i'm going full orson welles okay i'm just giving up i i'm i'm never getting laid again obviously with this beard i'm just giving up pretty much i'm 50. It's done.

Let me, let me, if I may, let me tell you actually, cause this is, I think this is something that, that, that your listeners will be curious to hear about how I got into living nomadic. So I do live nomadically. I'm a nomad. My wife and I live all over the world and kind of got into it sort of kind of by accident. Back in 2006, we're talking 12 years ago, my kids are growing up now. But back then, we decided to go on a family vacation. We decided to go to – we wanted to check out Mayan ruins and go to Central America and Southern Mexico and check out pyramids and all these different Mayan sites. We figured, well, that's going to take us a while because it takes a while to get from one to the other. And there's so many of them down there. So we figured we could be down there for about

six weeks. And I'm like, I can't, you know, I can't take six weeks off. And then it basically occurred to me, you know, I'm a writer and, you know, I do various things. I was a consultant at the time as well. And it's like, what if, if I'm lucky, maybe I can find enough Wi-Fi. Because this is, you know, again, 2006. It was far less ubiquitous there than it is now. And then I thought, you know, but what I'll do is I'll do the right thing. I'm going to tell my editors what's happening so they understand. And then after thinking about it a while, I thought, you know what, this is actually a

really interesting experiment. I want to not tell anyone and see if anyone can tell, see if there's any difference. And so that's exactly what I did. I went down there, I went scrounging for Wi-Fi connections. I submitted all my columns. I did all my stuff. Nobody knew. I was on conference calls. I called sources. I did all the journalist stuff. It was a little bit harder. It took a little bit longer, mainly because back then the only Wi-Fi was in hotels. And back then, Wi-Fi was scarce, but passwords were even scarcer. So you just go up to next door to a hotel in Guatemala somewhere and just see the Wi-Fi network, it's the only one, and then log on, no password, and that was

fairly common. So it worked and I was like, wow, this is amazing. And so we started doing a little bit more and a little bit more. Next thing you know, we were in Greece for more than a year. I think it was a year and a half or something like that. In Greece, Cuba, a bunch of other places. We started doing this. I've been doing this for 12 years, except for the two years where I was working at Twit. It was a desk job, so I was at Twit for two years. Besides that, the remaining 10 years, I've been on and off nomadically.

We've done it all. For many years, we had no house at all. Now we have, now we kind of, we have this, I write about it in the book, but we have like a kind of share an apartment with my son and when we're here like we live our stuff here and that's the main thing, it's the storage. And that's what we do. So I'm leaving Tuesday. I'm right now in Silicon Valley but Tuesday I go back to Europe we're gonna be there for a couple months and I gotta say it's just the greatest lifestyle ever it's just the most wonderful thing ever and I recommend check it out yeah and you've you've encapsulated that in your new book and I'm sure that people can get that on Amazon as well yes um and and

and yeah I guess if you want to I'm meeting more and more people we've had some people on the podcast that are doing the automatic life. They're living out of vans, and they're traveling around and seeing the world, seeing the nation. And I've been really jealous of that, especially as a photographer. There was a while, several years back, where I bought all my really nice cameras and lenses, and I would go on day jaunts to go and shoot stuff sometimes week on jaunts and I just sometimes I just go up PCH1 in California and just shoot up the beach or I go down to Venice and shoot right you know I really got to a point where I'm like

you know I should just really maybe live out of an RV get get an RV and just travel. At the time, my two puppies were both 15 and 16 and really on the downslopes of their age and with arthritis and everything, they were just not going to travel well. And so I kind of put that off and maybe someday I'll get back into that. It's so hard because, you know, it's the old George Carlin thing, you know, where you have so much stuff and then once you get stuff you got to get stuff to put your stuff in to get more stuff and then you get more stuff you know that i quote that in my book do you really that's a great that's exactly that's exactly he encapsulated it perfectly and that's exactly right hey by the way did you ever read

a book called travels with charlie no i believe it was by John Steinbeck and it was later in his career and it was during the 60s he took off in an RV with his poodle Charlie and he his his observation was that if you have a dog with you you will always make friends because that dog will go out and run up to people and like find other dogs, find other people and everybody loves dogs, you know, and so it's like you end up in a conversation and he referred to Charlie as his ambassador. His ambassador dog. Yeah. And he traveled around.

And by the way, you've mentioned about driving around the US in an RV. This is actually where I first heard about a nomadic existence. I don't recall his name. Years ago, I think it was during the 90.S. in an RV. This is actually where I first heard about a nomadic existence. I don't recall his name, but years ago, I think it was during the 90s actually, there was another tech writer who was also into hang gliding, I think it was. And so he drove around the country looking for places to hang glide and worked where he could. I don't know. I have no idea how he did this in the 90s, but somehow he figured out. I think he had some super expensive connections,

satellite connection or something from Zarbio. I don't know how he did it, but he made a living doing what he really wanted to do, which was travel on a hang glider to new places. And everybody's got their nirvana. Everybody's got their perfect situation. And the economics of it are something that people don't really understand. People always think that, you know, I must have some money from somewhere.

I mean, I'm a journalist, so where is that coming from? But the reality is that you spend a little bit more on certain obvious things like airfare and stuff like that, my case because i tend to go abroad and then you spend a lot less on other things and what you don't do if you go on vacation people think that traveling all the time is expensive because they know that when they go on a vacation it's super expensive but on a vacation two things are happening first of all all your costs are duplicated while you're paying for shelter in a hotel in some sunny shore somewhere you're still paying for your shelter back home that you're not using while you're paying for shelter in a hotel in some sunny shore somewhere you're still paying for your shelter back home that you're not using while you're paying for transportation and taxis

and buses and all that stuff you're still paying for your car insurance and all that stuff back home you're paying double for everything and secondly you're paying what i call a vacation tax because hotels are way more expensive than other forms of shelter uh all the forms of transportation all the food restaurant food is way more expensive than the food if you go to the store and all that stuff. So it's jacked up prices and it's duplicated. So when you live nomadically, you stay in an Airbnb, you go shopping in a regular grocery store,

you cook most of your own food. And so your costs are actually much lower because most of the places you're gonna go are gonna be cheaper. So I've lived in places, multiple places, where we paid 500 bucks a month for rent well we've also paid a lot more than that but like you can just choose if you want to go to an inexpensive place you're starting a new business you want to have free money freed up

you can go to like you know you can go to ecuador or you can go to any number of uh you know chiang mai is where almost everybody goes because the the lifestyle is very good in Chiang Mai, and the cost of living is very low, and so people want to start a business, they go there. And they're not really nomadic, they just are expats, they go and live in Chiang Mai. But whatever your nirvana is, you can do it. You can figure out how to do it and do it, and it's a fantastic lifestyle.

So in your book, I suppose you outline the strategies of how to do this, the different things you do. Do you usually try and target maybe countries where the currency tradeoff is better considering the dollar or something like that? Not really. There's a far greater cost savings in terms of how you choose where to live, how you choose how to live, all that kind of stuff than an exchange rate. So for the most part, we don't really pay that much attention to it. We go to places we really want to go to. A recent example, my wife decided that she was fascinated by the food and wine culture in Georgia, the country. And I was like, okay, let's go live in

Georgia. So we basically lived in Georgia for six months. And I was like, okay, let's go live in Georgia. So we basically lived in Georgia for six months. We didn't even think about the exchange rate or whatever. It turned out to be very advantageous because the cost of living in Georgia is pretty low actually. But then we went to, you know, France where it's pretty high and we spent a lot of time in Northern Italy where the cost of living, yeah, it's not low, it's not high. It's, you know, it's fairly comparable um and so no we don't pay that much attention to it it's uh you win some you lose some like sometimes you go to very expensive places and sometimes go to very cheap places and it kind of in the end it ends up

working out fine and i guess airbnb is a big proponent uh that they've really they've really democratized hoteling and stuff like that where there's a lot of opportunities, a lot of ability to shop around for the best prices and what you kind of want and what sort of atmosphere or location you're looking for. Yeah. Well, and I have, you know, people are unfamiliar with Airbnb. There's actually a lot of skill involved in using Airbnb correctly, and there's a lot of information people don't realize about Airbnb.

For example, they don't really show you everything. You think you go to an area and you're like, oh, I want to live in this city. Show me all the things. They don't show you all of them. If they gave you exactly what you wanted, which was like, here are all the places in this city ranked from best to worst, you'd have 500 people want the best place. And then nobody would want the bottom two thirds. And so they can't have that. They want to find one place for every,

you know, guest for every host, host for every guest. And so they fudge around with the data and kind of like, it's sort of the equivalent of what Facebook does with your newsfeed. They don't show you all the things. They just, they use algorithms and stuff like that to show you some of them. So you think you're getting all of them them but you're not even getting the majority and so i talk about how to get around that i also one of my favorite tips actually for finding a place i live in i recommend that every single person do this like right now or immediately after the show because it's super super fun to do but do it and it's kind of an obvious thing once you do it. So you know the site operator for Google, right?

So site colon xyz.com. Well, go to site colon airbnb.com, right? Just search for that, and then go to the Google image search, and then put something in front of that for the search. Tree house, ocean view, dog dog friendly whatever it is whatever your search it whatever you think you want to check a castle you know whatever you want to check out and then site colon Airbnb comm and you just browse photos you like that's where I want to live look at that castle look at that dog

friendly castle click on it and takes you right into Airbnb and you're looking at the listing that's that's the way to do it because let's face it you're going to pick this place based on what it looks like in the pictures you might as well start with the pictures and that's true nomadic i you know i mean you guys are living a life of a dream where you guys go ah let's go live in a treehouse house or you know i mean that's brilliant what you've come up with and being able to nail down all sorts of different experiences because i'm a person who likes different things that's part of the reason i'm single um and um and so you know being able to find what you want and and you know let's try this for fun see what that's like and we've done a lot of that we've we've gone places

a day after we decided to go there uh sometimes we plan you know usually we plan way ahead you can save a fortune if you you know if you're planning way ahead um and then you you know you you you can you can see this is another part of the economics if you if you let's say you wanted to go on a vacation uh and you wanted to go to let's say you want to go to Italy right and you know like oh my vacation is like between Christmas and New Year's right so you go and you search for the airfare you search for an Airbnb and it's you're locked into that date well you just say and you don't really think about that but let's say you want to go to Italy you want to go to France you go you want to go to Croatia you want to go to China and you want to go to France, you want to go to Croatia, you want to go to China, and you want to go to Puerto Rico, right? You can fudge the timing on all that stuff for maximum

advantage and basically end up paying half for everything based on when you go. So for example, you go to Google Flights and you're like, oh, you know, I want to go to China. And you try going to China in a month. Try going to China in nine months. try going to China in a month try to try going to China in nine months try to go into China like and and you fudge it notice that the airfares are just like you know sometimes they're triple based on just the date you pick right and you can do that with every place you go and mix and match and you know one example is one time um we were going to go live in the south of France for a few months and we were going to is one time um we were going to go live in the south of france for a few months and we were going to live in nice and we're going to live in marseille and we're

going to live in exxon provence and all this kind of stuff and so we had it all scheduled and you know we had it all set and then we realized the place in nice was half the price if we went later right so um so we just switched the dates on the XM Provence and Nice, and we ended up saving like 500 bucks or something like that. So when you're nomadic, you can just sort of right-size the timing, everything. It sounds like you need to open your own travel agency, Mike. The truth is my wife would do that, but she's already got her too many businesses already. But yeah, she's really the ninja at this traveling, at the scheduling and travel

and stuff like that. But it's all in the book. And I recommend if people are interested in travel of any kind, check out the book just for that. And there's so many tips in there about Airbnb, getting air travel, all that kind of kinds of not to just shamelessly pitch the book but it's is a lot there's a lot of savings if you really want to make it make travel affordable this is there's a lot of great tips in there well based upon what I've seen I mean you you've definitely mastered the tips and tricks of traveling the world and and you know doing it inexpensively to where you're not getting you know paying these top dollar prices.

And yeah, definitely planning ahead makes a difference in the thing. Maybe I should have been a flight attendant. I don't know. But yeah, being able to do what you do is just amazing. And I think it's great you put in the book because I think a lot of us

has just sat around and been like, how freaking rich is Mike? Right, exactly. And in general, like I actually calculated it once because I think a lot of us has just sat around and been like, how freaking rich is Mike? Right, exactly. And in general, like I actually calculated it once, and in general what I realized is that I could make a lot more money if I went to New York City and worked in a magazine or something like that and I could work as an editor and stuff. I've worked as an editor before, and you can just make a ton more money.

LA, New York City, San Francisco, I could make a fortune. But I figure that living nomadically, my income is probably half of what it would be, and my cost of living is about a third of what it would be living in an expensive place like New York City or San Francisco. So I come out way ahead even though the economics are completely shifted. And so, you know, it's a tradeoff and it takes some time and some tweaking.

But, you know, people have to decide. Some people are just homebodies, right? You're one of those people? Then no, don't do this yeah you know it it really does come down to quality life and how much money you have left over at the end of the day i i lived a life at one point where i had uh places uh where i was living where our offices were in utah vegas and denver and and it was just a nightmare of trying to deal with it all and schedule it all and of course I was having to replicate my life you know I'm like we gotta do the same silverware

at each place and it just it just I was unhappy as I could as I've ever been in my life and most people would think you'd be really happy at that point and it was not and moving back to a much simpler life where I didn't have you know multiple cars at airports parked all it was not and moving back to a much simpler life um where i didn't have you know multiple cars at airports parked all the time and all the stupid crap that went to support that sort of lifestyle just having a much more simpler life and more money left over at the end of the day you know it comes down that fight club thing the the things you own end up owning you which probably goes back to the george carlin yeah we need more stuff um and and uh you know i think those two things the fight club line and the george carlin thing made me really realize you know you got to get rid of stuff and if you get rid of if you're if you're living on the road i mean you're you think you think how much your

housing expense costs to live in a home yeah and then you got all your utilities that you pay and I mean it's a major expense or portion of everyone's paychecks when it comes down to what you pay for your housing yeah um you know I've got a lot of friends like you do that live in San Francisco and I keep trying to you know I keep telling hey come to Vegas yeah you can live you can buy a mansion here like literally a mansion for for your little two bedroom home in san francisco the the job situation is is amazing yeah i mean for what you can save you can fly because it's so cheap to fly out of mccarran playing it out from sfo if you want to go to work you know you can fly in the commute is probably the same when it comes to hours to get to work yeah yeah right exactly exactly

and then you you come here you can live in a mansion I think Robert Robert Scoble I was trying to coat get him to move down here with Maryam and I guess Maryam really wants to go to SoCal because because there's a lot they have a lot of family and so they can have support with the kids and stuff down there but I was trying to get him to move here and i looked up some of the homes of what they were looking for price wise monthly and i'm like you can live in a mansion here in vegas but yeah when you look at what your costs are uh that's what i did i looked at an rv uh or even like a camper van that i could escape on like weekend jaunts or maybe take a week off a month and just

go on a shooting thing take the dogs and just go shoot and and I like to wander like like when I travel I just like to I like to look for offbeat things or offbeat buildings or old historic stuff or stuff that you know I just like to wander around I go wait what's over there go over there let's go over there and poke around and see if there's any see if there's any great photographs you know everyone always goes to the the same places like let's go to the you know zion national park and obviously you're gonna get great shots there that's a given but everybody's seen that stuff and uh so sometimes i like to just go find offbeat stuff that that uh you're not gonna do and i imagine you guys have a lot of fun with that that you just there's a lot of discovery you guys go through when you're wandering absolutely i mean

what we like to do is we like to be um what we call temporary locals so we're not we're not visitors per se we'll just live there and then once we're living there we walk in around just just serendipity discovering things and stuff like that but just one little quick thing and you mentioned uh you know you're talking about uh the cost of things and stuff like that. But just one little quick thing, and you mentioned, you know, you're talking about the cost of things and stuff like that. But I've got a little meditation on this in the book. But basically, my theory about why people buy things, why do people go to the movies? Why do people read novels? Why do people want the latest phone? My theory is that we are, our minds are so active and we're inherently bored with things and we want something new. So there's, I call it the novelty tax. So you basically, you know, you want to try some new food. So you want to go to an Indian restaurant and stuff like

that because you can't get that kind of food in your kitchen or whatever. Or you want to go to an Indian restaurant and stuff like that because you can't get that kind of food in your kitchen or whatever. Or you want to go to a movie. You don't want to see the movie you saw last weekend. I mean, sometimes the movie is so great you want to see it again, but that's different. Normally, you want to see a movie because I haven't seen it. I want a new movie. And during the movie, I want to forget it's a movie and I want to sort of be in the movie like as if I'm experiencing somebody else's life. This is why we read novels. This is what fiction is largely about, what storytelling

is about. When you live nomadically, especially if you live in an Airbnb, you essentially, everything is always new. You don't need to buy anything extra in order to relieve that boredom with the same old same old nothing is ever the same it's always new and icing on the cake in Airbnb you're basically living in someone else's house you're living in somebody else's neighborhood you're living in somebody else's country and you kind of living the life of somebody else in a way it feels like that like you you we we go live in northern Italy we're going back there Tuesday, like I said. And it's like, we're Italian when we're there. We're locals. We have a

network of friends there. We eat the Italian food. We do all this stuff. And then we shift gears and we go to Turkey. And so this is one of the reasons why the costs, this is kind of a weird idea that most people don't think about.'s this is one of the reasons why the costs this is kind of a weird idea that most people don't think about but this is one of the reasons why it costs less you don't have to buy stuff to get new stuff everything is always new automatically and you don't have to buy anything to get it you just have to be there somewhere else and it's social media made it easier to network because I see you like you're out to be there somewhere else and it's social media made it easier to network because i i see you like you're out to dinners or you're over at someone's house having dinner

with them and in some locale and i've always thought that was really fun to go to european countries because i always see how they they turn meals into like um a social setting and it's it's just like a it's like it's a whole sort of meeting hangout sort of thing instead of just let's shove some food in our face and go watch a movie. It's the most curious thing because I'm a bit of a – I'm not a social type person. But in Europe and in some other countries, I become one because the culture is so amenable these dinners uh i mean we're talking five six seven eight hour dinners uh that go on to two in the morning and it's the bottles of wine keep going and it's like you know it's just it's just the greatest thing in the world you know interesting people interesting conversation fantastic food everybody talks about

food you know it's like at least in in the friends that we have made, everybody talks about food almost exclusively. And it's just, it's a great lifestyle, but it always varies, you know, it's always different. And the interesting thing is that food isn't about food really. It's really about that social interaction. It's about culture and history and all those things. When we were in Morocco last year, we were there, was it last year? I think it was last year. We were there during Ramadan, which as a wine drinker was a huge mistake, let me tell you. It turned out to be really great anyway and you know we lived in a, we literally lived in a 600 year old Riyadh, which was just in Fez.

And we made friends. And one of our friends is like, hey, it's the last night of Ramadan. My mother wants you to come over to our house and just have Ramadan with us. And I guess we'd had two Ramadan meals, but it lasts a month. And what they do is they fast all day. And then when the sun goes down, when it's official sundown they they have iftar which is the breaking of the of the daily fast and it's a big elaborate meal with special foods and special desserts and all this kind of stuff and it's everybody's happy because they finally get to eat because they're grumpy all day they don't you know they don't drink water nothing all about yeah yeah we were actually during this trip we went to and it was

during ramadan we went to this hair desert and we took some camels out in the middle of the desert and the the berbers who are with us we're not drinking water all day oh my god direct sun in is surrounded by nothing but sand and man were they happy when ramadan came here anyway so we went to this friend's house, and we're not Muslim. They don't care. It was like food. It was like, you know, and they were happy. They were so happy to share their culture with us, and we were so happy that they were sharing their culture with us, and it was just everybody was so happy, and we experienced that a lot. And this is really, this is why my book is called Gastro Nomad because I actually said, you know, people are like, why do you do it? Well, why do you do it exactly?

Well, I like to travel. Well, why do you like to travel exactly? And it's like if you keep peeling away that onion, you get to the inescapable conclusion. You do it for the food. That's why you travel. That's why I've rearranged my entire life. I've changed the trajectory of occlusion. You do it for the food. That's why you travel. That's why I've rearranged my entire life. I've changed the trajectory of my career. I've severed. I mean, that's why you do it. It's for the food. I think we love collecting experiences. I mean, you mentioned that earlier.

That's what we do when we see movies, when we read books, when we watch TV shows. We're looking for experiences. Like you say, we get bored. One of my favorite people to watch is Anthony Bourdain. When I grow up, I want to be Anthony Bourdain, especially when he's being skinny. But watching him go around the world and meet people, and this is one of the reasons I love my podcasts

because I love meeting different people. I love crawling into their skin, trying to find out what motivates them what what what what what's brought them there and where they're going and and what makes them tick and the differences of this thing I've always had this I've always been a people watcher this way podcast has worked really well because I really enjoy well I enjoy for the most. There are some guests that I didn't enjoy, but you are the exception. I'm loving you. But, you know, I think we all want those different things and being able to enjoy just wonderful food and different cultures and experiences.

I think that just really expands your mindset. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sorry, go ahead. And just, yeah, it just expands your mindset, gets you to see the world, and probably brings us better to a one-world thing where we all understand that we're all just humans instead of people in different countries going, we hate you. Yeah. You know, that sounds kind of cliche, but the reality is that that is, in fact, the reality.

Like there has been research that has shown that the more foreign travel you do, the more your trust of foreigners goes up. And it's a very simple reason for that, which is that you actually realize how much everyone has in common and you know it actually you don't you know it's human nature to to sort of like be wary of other cultures you know people it's a source of guilt and shame or or ostracization or any number of things in our culture to have bits of bigotry or whatever. And in polite society, you try to mask them, hide them, suppress them, get rid of them, overcome them. You try to do all that stuff, and that's the right thing to do. It takes a lot of effort.

But in fact, if you do live in multiple countries all over the world, it takes a few years, but you just get to the point where you can't see other people as them. You just don't see it anymore. It just evaporates. And you just don't, that us and them thing is just gone. And for that reason, you know, that's one of the great fringe benefits of living nomadically.

I just see everyone, I see people differently than I used to and see them, the distinction is gone. Why do people do what they do and how we do it? I think one of the greatest things about humanity is the different, just all the differences between us. We're all human. You cut us open, we all bleed the same. We're all red on the inside. But we have these complex things that we built with different cultures, different peoples,

different places in the world, different French sort of areas and the way they do things, the habits they have and the traditions they have. That's the word I'm looking for. And then, you know, you go to other places, they have different traditions. I remember one time I think I had a Russian friend over to my house or something, or maybe it was my office. And they have some sort of thing in Russia about crossing the threshold of the door or something. I think it was shaking hands across the floor. I don't remember exactly. But there was something that they had a tradition of.

And instead of me thinking it was stupid, I'm like, because I didn't think of it. I'm like, that's a little silly. But then I realized, well, that's their tradition. And that's kind of interesting. Like, why do they have that? And I've been lucky in my life where i've been a people watcher and been curious about people their psychology is what they do why they do it how they got there uh part of it's you know trying to heal my own experiences

as a flawed human being um at you know my journey and trying to figure out what i'm doing and why i'm here i mean i just turned 50 and came to some new epiphanies that I realized, wow, I wish I'd come to these sooner, but I'm glad I'm finally here. But I'm learning that the older I get, the less I know. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. I feel the same way. And one of the epiphanies that I've had is that, you know, as Americans, we grew up and we're taught to believe that we've got it figured out better than anyone else. Like, you know, the American way is the best way to do things and all that kind of stuff. And the United States, in fact, is amazing.

I mean, it really is. things, you realize that in 99% of the cases, the way people do things is the very best way to do what they're trying to do based on the resources, the climate, the history, all that stuff. You will not come up with a better way to do things than people for where they are. It's just a testament to the innate genius of humanity that everyone everywhere figures out—by that I mean over the centuries, peoples in general—figure out how to build the best life they can based on the resources and everything else. And there's a million different ways to do everything. And people always end up with the best one. That's why whenever you go somewhere, you live like the locals

because there's no better way to live in that place. And it's just really amazing to see how people do things. It's just absolutely incredible. Yeah, because I get sick of me. I get sick of me a lot. And one of the reasons I have been nomadic and single is because I like doing different things. I'll go do photography for several years,

and then I'll sell the cameras, and then I'll go wander off and do something else, and then I'll do something else. My whole life has been these projects and things that I want to take and do and the freedom that I want to have to do them where I don't have to answer to anybody. But being able to do that has made my life pretty interesting. I've done some things that a lot of people haven't been able to do in life or probably never will and probably fantasize to do.

And I may have fantasies about living their lives or living maybe more of a normal uh life i mean sometimes i sit around and go maybe i should get married and settle down or you know what who knows but that's the beauty of life it's it's this catalog of experiences and and traditions and and different people in different settings in different worlds and being able to open your eyes to that and experience it, and of course the food. But I remember the line from, it was a thing that really got me thinking about it, was a line from Sting's song.

It was about the Russians. I can't remember the title of the song exactly. But he makes a comment in it, and you and I probably grew up in the area where we were hiding under our little wooden desks in the hopes that a nuclear bomb from russia would that you know the wooden desk would save us um and you know they were the great evil ussr uh but there was a line in his song that he said he said you know the russians are like us they they have children their parents they want their kids to grow up and do well they want to make enough money to provide for their children their future put food on the table they're the same human beings that

we are and that's really what you experience in the world and when i watch anthony berdine or like your photos that's what i'm seeing i'm like it's the human experience of going out and hanging out with other humans and and uh i mean I really love the the French lifestyle the you know where they go out every day and they eat fresh food I use some of that context in for me losing weight I started going eat fresh fruit and buying my produce every day at the store and you know and and then you go well well that's probably why they're healthier than we are over here yeah and I think so actually is a nice segue we were talking about this a little bit before uh you

you we started the show um so one of our projects my wife invented a diet called the spartan diet um like something like uh probably 10 years ago and she's been developing it ever since and it is very much about it, it's obsessed with the idea that the cause of all of our diet related things are about, not about quantity, we focus too much on quantity or types of food. It should be low fat, or no, it's high fat, now it's supposed to be low sugar, all that kind of stuff. And it's the quality of food, the idea of this diet is the quality of food that matters far more than anything else. Quantity is important.

Also balance, but freshness, like you were saying, the sort of description. So I guess the best way to describe the Spartan diet is that it's like a super hardcore Mediterranean diet. And it's just the most brilliant thing. So we often go and overindulge in lots of food because if the food is special, if the food is special in some way or another because it's with special people or it's a special event or the food itself is special, we don't worry too much about the overindulging. We're not going to go somewhere like, oh, we don't eat that. We never say that. Right. But then when we're not confronted with a scenario where it's special, then we go right back on the Spartan diet. And

so it lets us stay super healthy. It helps us, you know, we can overindulge in, say, wine or whatever, but we never become alcoholics because unless there's some good reason, we're like not drinking anything. So we'll say it's a great thing. I mean, you will go off it, but it's a great thing to come back to. And it's just fantastic. You want to go to spartandiet.org and check it out. It's a great blog there with lots of information and the book is going to be coming out sometime within the next year or so.

Cool. And what's the website again for that? Spartandiet.org. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. I'll have to check it out. So does it deal with just the ingredients that are in the food when you say quality food? Very much so. So it's the thing about the Spartan diet is that it is very unlike most diets. It's not simple to describe. It's actually fairly complex, but, but to sort of summarize how, how the diet works, it's very hardcore about food quality, like very hardcore about food quality. So every ingredient you could possibly cook with, for example, exists on a spectrum. So you're going to cook with some sort of cooking fat,

okay? So the very lowest quality might be some some some kind of nasty industrial trans fat You know or some palm oil or something like that and it goes all the way up the spectrum To the very highest quality is probably like really fresh extra virgin olive oil, right? and so you really want to Obsess about that and and then you get to the point of sugar Well, there's lots of sugar that's really bad And then you can go all the way up to the very healthiest kind of sugar which is just like fresh fruit or something like that or if you want a sort of an extracted sugar maybe dates or you

know uh raw honey or something like that very high quality raw honey so you keep pushing the food quality up the spectrum and you and uh there's a lot of stuff about fish and the health qualities of fish there's a lot of emphasis on nuts and and which are the healthiest kinds of nuts and how to get the really good kind and how to get where do you get raw nuts like the California for example people don't know that they're essentially illegal in the stores when you go and you get raw nuts and the groceries are they are not raw and there's a million little things like that that my wife is like an expert at and grapples with. And what you find is that when you're maximizing the quality of the food,

things like weight loss happen almost automatically. Things like, you know, all kinds of wonderful things happen to your health and really the the real reason for the health crisis that almost everybody is suffering from is that the the quality of our food is crap basically uh yeah and it's the low quality of the food that's get killing us even though it we're always being told that it's the quantity or the type is the quality of the food it's very low quality food and it's not biologically compatible with the human body. Yeah, I'm going to have to check that out because I need to get back on track after a year and a half.

I lost – I mean, I can attest to what you were saying because I went from just eating very poorly to a vegan diet. And from the vegan diet I also made sure that I was going to fresh foods what I call it live foods instead of dead foods you know I stayed out of the the frozen section of the of the store and stuck to the outer areas where there's live foods and and really my my focus is on live high quality foods and like you say instead of going for sugars I was like well let's eat an

apple let's eat a peach eat a banana and I lost 70 pounds what was it in like three months I mean I just had pounds falling off me two to three pounds a day and and it was a real testament to how poisonous our food was at least that's what I called it that that our food is poison. And when you look at the high rates of diabetes and cancer that we have now and all this sort of stuff that's out of control, it really goes back to our food. And I remember watching the movie, I think it was Food Incorporated, and there's a few other movies that are out there that talk about the food issues that we have

and, you know, the high corn syrup issues and stuff like that. Some people, they play victim and they go, oh, they sell this to me. No, you don't have to buy the package of Oreos. You can just say no and you can go to the produce section. Ironically, consuming foods like Oreos makes you almost need foods like oreos and and so this is you know it is really difficult people can get caught in a cycle where the the foods create their own cravings that can be so intense that it's like impossible to resist them this is by design a lot of the foods are designed to be like that. Let me tell you a really interesting story.

So one of my wife's businesses we have called Experiences. So we'll go someplace for a week. We invite a bunch of people, you know, a bunch like, you know, six people, eight people, something like that. We live all in a big house in some city. And we go do food, like really hardcore stuff that my wife has put together over a period of months. And so it's an intense week of just making cheese tasting wine doing this doing that it's like food all day so we've done one we've got two more coming up in the next two months so that's why we're going to europe actually because we're doing provence and the prosecco hills of italy but the first one we

did was in barcelona so we lived in this really beautiful place in Barcelona, and it was food all day, every day for a week. We were going to the bakery and had, you know, hands-on with, like, how they make, like, bread with the best baker in Spain, basically. She had just won an award as the top baker in Spain right before the event. So we were eating all these bread products. We went to a coffee tasting thing. We went to a wine tasting.

And then we went tapas. we're doing vermouth and we're like i mean it was just insane the amount of food we're eating we're always just like sort of maxing them out out the amount of we all lost like five pounds each wow we were shocked we're like oh my god you know we're gonna have to but the food quality was just as good as it gets. When you're traveling too, you're probably moving around a lot more than you would when you're sitting around at home watching TV. Yeah. I mean,

we weren't doing that much exercise. There was a little bit of, a little bit of walking and stuff, probably less exercise than normal. The, the, the weight loss was all because, because we were just having the highest,

very highest quality of everything. Yeah. Everything was organic. Everything was made from scratch. Because we were just having the highest, very highest quality of everything. Yeah. Everything was organic. Everything was made from scratch, farm to table. And, you know, because we were going for the highest quality food, we didn't know or we weren't expecting that anybody would lose weight. We figured people would gain 5, 10 pounds in a week like that, you know. And pretty much everybody lost weight.

It was incredible. Yeah. And and you're right you mentioned this earlier they're making food in labs now where they are basically turning us into guinea pigs to tap into I think it's the dopamine in our brain they affected it has to addict us to get us hooked on on this food drug that they've taken and made this co algorithm of of ingredients that you can't even read you're like I don't know what you know yellow flavor five what is what the hell is that yeah here's an example that I think it's really really interesting so scientists have actually found that

zero-calorie artificial sweetener actually can contribute to developing diabetes yeah and this is completely counterintuitive it can actually cause weight gain more than a sugar drink can because because the this whole bill of goods we've been handed of calories are that we're basically a gas tank. I mean, food, the calories are just the energy potential of what we take in and then the energy that we burn. And then whatever's left over, that's the weight gain or whatever. That is simply not the case.

We can mess up or improve our metabolism in a wide variety of ways. Our gut microbes is a whole new world of scientific inquiry that they're discovering. Almost everything is related to our gut microbes. And so at the end of the day, they haven't discovered anything. They've just barely started discovering the gut microbe thing.

But at the end of the day, here's what they're going to discover. Whole natural foods that have the least amount of human intervention and and all that kind of stuff are going to be best for you variety is very good fresh seasonal foods is better on and on and on so it's like you don't have to wait to for all the science to come in the thing to do is to just always be gravitating to the highest quality, freshest seasonal

foods you can. And that will give you a big advantage in overcoming any sort of addictions or cravings and all that kind of stuff as well. And there's all kinds of tips. So here, let me give you a tip, Chris, that will trigger weight loss or slow weight gain in literally anyone so on the spartan diet one of the things we encourage people to do is always drink a big full glass of water before you do before or after you do anything so the most important one is right before you

eat any food at all you chug a glass water, in my case sometimes I'll chug two. One of the things that does immediately is it cuts your hunger down to less than half. You're starving, I can't wait to eat. We all have that feeling all the time. Part of that is dehydration. Part of that is a whole bunch of things cause intense hungers and cravings. Chug some water before you eat, before you start making choices about how fast to eat, how much to eat, all that stuff. And without even thinking about it, without trying that hard, you will automatically eat significantly less. Easy to do, super healthy, this way to also stay hydrated. So never eat unless you drink a glass of water before you eat. That's it. I would recommend everybody do that,

and you'll see in a few weeks that it actually makes a difference. And I can second your motion to witness that that is an incredible thing to do. One of the blessings I got when I was losing weight was I reviewed a product that's a huge reverse osmosis thing. It's got about 12 filters in it. It's got like three UV filters. Is that something behind you? What's that?

Is that behind you now? No, these are my speakers. It's downstairs. It's a company called, it escapes me right now, but people see me talk about it but it's actually a system to that generates water from air it pulls the humidity in from the air and will create water you don't have to put water if you don't want humidity in Vegas very little it's very little and it has to work really hard to make water but it will it just won't make much but I tend to just put

water in it so they can clean it up and and I got to tell you one of the things that really helped me lose weight and why you're right about this water thing is making getting a quality of water that was reverse osmosis and super clean made water my experience with water and drinking it might am i am I want to take and keep drinking it was, was this machine and you don't really have to buy this machine. You could buy probably any reverse osmosis or something. If basically, I guess what I'm trying to say is if you really try and focus on getting

quality of water, it's going to taste better for you. You're going to have a better experience. I mean, anytime I go back and drink tap water, cause I'm just, I'm just like maybe trying to pop some vitamins or something like that, tap water tastes like sewer water. I know. People are always like, why do people drink bottled water? Tap water is fine.

I'm like, there are some cities where the tap water is actually quite nice. New York City is one of them. But most of the tap water I've tasted is just horrible. I mean, it's unthinkable. And so having that good taste kind of helps your brain go whatever. You know, one of the things that helped me in losing weight was I read Penn Jillette's book, Presto. And I'm good friends with Ray Cronin, who is the guy he refers to as Cray Ray in there and one

of the things that Cray Ray talks about is resetting your palate and our problem is we're addicted to all this high sugar you know Oreos and Hostess Twinkies and our tongue and our and our palates are so addicted to this crap and so what he does he put you on a two-week diet where you pretty much just eat potatoes or something starchy you can do beans you do anything but basically you get away from the sugar and you just go to this thing and what it does is it magically reset your palate and so then when you go back to bananas and oranges and stuff the flavor is just pop out and they set off that dopamine

in your brain again. The problem is we're eating this high sugar, high fructose corn syrup crap that produce and apples and oranges can't compete with. We're like, this is just, you live on the sugar high. Then you have the sugar crashes and you just live this life of going up and down. I remember I used to live on Rolaids. I would pop two or three of those and sometimes I'd get up in the middle of the night to take some more Rolaids.

Once I went to an all fresh food, high quality diet like you talked about, I went in the bathroom one time after six months and I went, what is this? Oh my God, it's the Rolaids bottle. I haven't seen you in six months and it just makes such a difference I've got one of the other things I invested in well actually I reviewed this product but this is kind of an investment when it comes down to it is a really good cooler system for my water so my water's in there from my from my system downstairs yeah and this thing will keep the water cool for 24 hours and so this is part of my strategy you know doing what you said keep water around keep drinking it i've got it sitting right here you've seen me drink it sometimes the show and i'm one of those the other thing is too is is

hacking your brain i'm one of those uh i forget what it's called i'm a nervous person so i'll sit and drink whatever's in front of me if you put a vodka in front of me i'll get drunk yeah you put a thing of water in front of me i'll drink the water whatever's in front of me if you put a vodka in front of me I'll get drunk yeah put a thing of water in front of me I'll drink the water whatever is in front of me that you know there's kind of this tick I have and so learning to just always keep water within reach helps you know hack my brain yeah so it's really good so everyone check out the Spartan diet yeah yeah and then and there's also a newsletter that has every episode has a recipe so it's a free newsletter so you can see your wife's food I got a sign up for that newsletter for sure

yeah and I might be interested in I have to figure out a way to travel the dogs but one of these days I'd probably like to go on those jaunts you guys are putting together with groups of people because, you know, I definitely like to learn and have some hand-holding on stuff. So do you post those on Facebook when you announce them? Yes, you'll see them on Facebook. Also gastronomed.net is our website, and you can see experiences. It's one of the tabs. You can see those there, And all the ones listed,

you can go and get all the details and sign up there. I would recommend that. So yeah, absolutely. We'd love to have you along. And I think it'd be fantastic. We got some coming up in Morocco, Mexico City. We're going to do Provence and Prosecco Hills again next year. Probably do one in Sonoma.

And we have a whole bunch of other places we want to do. We'll do one in Georgia eventually. Yeah. I love doing different stuff and learning about stuff. When I first moved to Vegas, there was some Chinese investors that wanted to start a mortgage company. So I went to work with them and to build a mortgage company. And they used to love to take me down to their local Chinese restaurant. That's very authentic in Chinatown here in Las Vegas. And they, they had a lot of fun putting foods in front of Chris to see what Chris

would eat. And then later they'd tell me what it was. It's like, those are frog legs, Chris. Um, and it was interesting to see just the ways they prepare their meal. I remember one time,

the Chinese, one of my Chinese investors, he got angry with the waiter because evidently there's some way they have that they cook a certain sort of fish and when they cook it, it has to be alive and to get, I guess, a certain flavor, texture and temperature or whatever. And he could tell that the fish had been dead before they cooked it and he was angry. He's like, this been dead before they had cooked it. He was angry. He's like, this was dead before.

I'm like, wow. Why do people do that that way? He explained it. It was just such an adventure and stuff. I see a lot of that in your different stuff. I've got to read your book because it's got to be awesome. I think you'll enjoy it. Yeah, absolutely.

Sounds good, Mike. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show. Give us your plugs once again so people can look those up and get a hold of your book. I mean, the best thing you can do is go to Elgin.com. Elgin.com, everything is on that front page. You'll see links to everything else. If you want to go straight past Go and just check out elgin.com slash everything. And that's RSS feeds, newsletters, all the rest.

And I recommend that people check it out. Everything is free. And, yeah, whatever your interests are, food, tech, whatever it is. Before we go, though, I want to point out that I'm using a Pixelbook. I just arrived in the mail half an hour before I did this show. I was telling Chris before the show. And I opened it up. I logged in.

I opened Hangouts and started doing the show. And it's fantastic. This is the camera built into the Pixelbook. It's pretty good. And I'm so happy with this device already yeah they've been doing some great things with the with the Google Books and notebooks that they take and make we reviewed a bunch of them you know I mean I use Gmail for everything and Google products for everything in fact every time I buy an iPhone the first thing I do is step on the Google stuff, which is kind of funny. Oh, totally. Well, let me tell you the kookiest thing about this.

So this is the Google Pixel Pen, right? It's a stylus. It has a single button on it. I'm going to put that up there so you can see the button. When you press that button and hold it and circle anything on the screen, Google Assistant pops up and tells you what that thing is that you circled. Oh, wow. Wow.

And it's amazing. It's the coolest thing. So can you what that thing is that you circled. Oh, wow. Wow. And it's amazing. It's the coolest thing. So can you use that as a mouse too? Like you can just sit and- It's a pointing device. You can use it for drawing, for writing, handwriting recognition, all that stuff. But what's really kooky I think is the integration with Google Assistant. Well, it's simply recognize people, recognize dog breeds, whatever.

You can just go to Google image search, and you're like, what the hell is that? Just circle it, pops up and says, oh, that's a blah-dee-blah. Maybe amazing AI behind that, and it's all starts with it. It's just amazing what they're taking and doing with computers. And I've noticed that when you work around the world, I think a lot of times, I think you're on an iPad?

I was, and I've now replaced, I'm just, the whole purpose of this is I'm replacing my iPad and my MacBook Pro, both of which are in flawless condition, with this device, which is, you know, it's this thick when it's folded closed. The hinge goes all the way around, becomes a tablet. It's a laptop and it's a tablet in one.

There are advantages and disadvantages with the Apple devices, but one of the big advantages of this is it's a lot less hardware. It's a lot less weight. It's a single device. And I tend to live in Chrome anyway with Chrome extensions and Chrome bookmarks and stuff. That's kind of where I spend almost all my time. So it's like twice as fast on a Pixelbook as it is on a MacBook Pro to use Chrome. That's awesome. And it's probably 10 times cheaper?

Yeah. No, not the Pixelbook. Most Chromebooks are very inexpensive. I spend 2K on this thing. Oh, okay. That's probably still cheaper than a MacBook, isn't it? I don't know. I don't buy MacBooks. Half of them are more expensive than that and half of them are cheaper than that yeah i think the cheapest macbook pro is probably like 1200 bucks 1300 bucks on my yeah yeah i always giggle because all my friends are always down at the genius store fixing their their mac products yeah yeah no they're they're great products i I mean, there's absolutely nothing wrong with them. The sound quality on an iPad, for example, is far better than this device. There are multiple things. Probably the camera's better as well.

This camera's good enough, I think, but probably not as good as you find in a MacBook Pro. But, you know, having everything in the cloud, I just absolutely love that. And I love some of the other goodies that they come along with the pixel book I just think it's fantastic and it maximizes your freedom and being able to not have all this stuff you have to carry around as well too and it's instant ation you open it up and you're like you're going already cool well everyone check out Mike's book gastronom on gastronome no man's you. Gastronomad. I'll get that one. The art of living everywhere and eating everywhere with Mike.

And I love having you on the show, Mike. We'll love to have you back in the future. Everyone go check out his stuff. It's a difficult fish to catch here. I've made it very difficult for you, and I appreciate your patience. No, I've made it difficult for you too. I know we missed one thing, so I appreciate your patience as well. And it difficult for you too i know we missed one thing so i appreciate your patience as well and it's wonderful to get to actually kind of meet you not in real life but close enough yeah yeah exactly well and we'll look

forward to that moment when it comes so everyone go download his book or get his book from amazon.com be sure to check out his website as well for the diet uh be sure to tell your friends neighbors relatives or for people's show. We certainly appreciate it. Go to Google Play. Go to iTunes. You can subscribe there. You can also go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss.

Hit that bell notification. We, of course, have a great podcast for the Chris Voss Show. We have new videos going up. They're kind of like vlog videos of the Siberian Husky puppy, Rocky Raccoon.

And if the cuteness isn't blinding and painful enough, it's just so cute, you just can't stand it. It hurts. We also have the reviews of all the great products from the Chris Voss Show as well. Anyway, thanks for tuning in, people, and we'll see you guys next time.