The Tim Ferriss Show - #268: Eric Ripert -- Lessons in Mastery and Mindfulness

Episode Date: September 29, 2017

Eric Ripert (@ericripert) is recognized as one of the best chefs in the world. In 1995, at just 29 years old, he earned a four-star rating from The New York Times. Twenty years later and for the fifth consecutive time, Le Bernardin, where Eric is the chef and a co-owner, again earned the highest rating of four stars, becoming the only restaurant to maintain this superior status for such a marathon length of time. In 1998, the James Beard Foundation named him Top Chef in New York City and, in 2003, Outstanding Chef of the Year. In 2009, Avec Eric, his first TV show, debuted and ran for two seasons, earning two Daytime Emmy Awards. It returned for a third season on the Cooking Channel in 2015. Eric has also hosted the show On the Table on YouTube, which debuted in July 2012, and he has appeared in media worldwide. He is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir 32 Yolks: From My Mother's Table to Working the Line, Avec Eric, and several other books. In this episode we discuss: daily routines, conquering weakness and anger, mindfulness and meditation, the art of hiring, and much, much more. Please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Eric Ripert! This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you'll get 30 percent off your first order at†AthleticGreens.com/Tim.This podcast is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet.People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now -- this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take

one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by

Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers, and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and

book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time, because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free, it's always going to be free, and you can learn more at tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with, and little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday.

So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, ladies and germs, princesses and bridge trolls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another

episode of the Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to find out what makes them tick, what makes them good, and to unearth the specific tactics, habits, etc. that you can use. And this episode was so much fun for me. And I don't want you to take it at face value because we get into so much in terms of daily routine, visualizing things like weakness and anger to get rid of them. Multiple steps for mindfulness and meditation, training the mind, hiring, it covers so much ground. So I don't want you to be thrown off by the fact that it starts in the cooking world and the food world. It applies to so much more. The guest is, and I'm going to butcher a lot of French in this episode,

so get used to it. Eric Repert, R-I-P-E-R-T, who's recognized as one of the best chefs in the world. And you'll know why in a second. So in 1995, at 29 years old, he earned a four-star rating from the New York Times. 20 years later, and for the fifth consecutive time, Le Bernardin, which is in New York City, where Eric is the chef and co-owner, once again earned the New York Times highest rating of four stars, becoming the only restaurant to maintain this superior status for such a marathon length of time. In 1998, the James Beard Foundation named him top chef in New York City. Think about that for a minute, out of thousands of restaurants and probably the same number of chefs. And in 2003, outstanding chef of the year. And it goes on and on. He's had successful TV shows, A Vec Eric.

He has hosted the show On the Table on YouTube, which debuted in July, 2012, and has appeared in media worldwide. He's the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, 32 Yolks, From My Mother's Table to Working the Line, A Vec Eric, and several others. Now, one thing I'll point out. So Eric also, my first contact with him was through putting together my brand new book, which is Tribe of Mentors. And if you liked Tools of Titans, you're going to love Tribe of Mentors. And it's similar in format, but very different in the sense that 90 plus percent of the people in the book never appeared on the podcast. And you can learn more about Tribe of Mentors on all of your favorite booksellers, websites, BNN, Amazon, Apple iBooks, and so on. And if you want to go to, for instance, tim.blog forward slash tribe,

you can learn more about it. All right. So that is that. And really listen to this episode. We talk about hiring and restaurants for the first maybe 30 minutes, which is still worth listening to. And then we go really, really deep on a lot of specifics that can apply to everything and just about everyone. So long intro, but trust me, it's worth it. And please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Eric Ripert. Eric, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Very happy. I have been looking forward to connecting with you for some time.

I remember first coming across your smile on, I believe it was No Reservations, but it might have been Parts Unknown, where you took Anthony Bourdain back on the line to see if he had any of his endurance and skills left. Yeah, it was not much left, actually. It's why I was smiling and laughing so much. Because his idea was to torture me, to take me and put me on the line and see myself going down, right? He thought because I was the chef of Le Bernardin, I forgot how to cook on the line. And when he asked me, I said,

oh yeah, I know, I'm coming, no problem. But you have to be on the line yourself. And he went down so quickly. It was a great episode. And it caught me at a really good time and he went down so quickly. It was a great episode and it caught me at a really good time because I was doing research for a book I wrote called The 4-Hour Chef and I remember at the time,

just before seeing that, I went into Riverside Restaurant to actually attempt to do some prep work. My knife skills are not fantastic, but they were improving. And I remember watching people on the line and the people who were really good seemed like they had eight arms. I mean, they seemed like they were an octopus or something along those lines. And I was curious just as a starting point. I've read, for instance, that you really focus on mentality when you're hiring people and that there are certain things you can teach, but mentality is very important.

What makes, for instance, a good line cook or what types of people do you look for? Because I noticed when I was looking at, say, the forearms of some of these line cooks line cooks I mean it looked like they've been crawling through barbed wire and charcoal uh they're very very tough and uh they seem to really enjoy it almost like professional athletes also the action of the whole thing but uh what is what is a key mentality when you're looking for someone who's going to be good at something like that they all become good at one point. And nobody's born with knife skills. Nobody knows at three years old how to make a sauce and so on. This is details of craftsmanship.

And I'm not worried about the fact that we will be able to teach the person the the details of craftsmanship so i'm always thinking about the mentality of the person about if they are potentially a good team player if they are not a good team player if they cannot adapt and and be part of a team. I don't like that, and I will probably not hire them because it doesn't matter if they can multitask and they are brilliant at what they do. At one point, they will struggle during the night or during the lunch, and they need to help also as well the other part of the team that struggle so if they are very individualistic and they have a temper and they have an ego the chances the chances are they're not coming to

le bernardin they have to be humble they have to be disciplined and clean. And this is the obvious. Being humble is very important because it allows you to keep yourself curious and motivated. If your ego is in a way, it makes you blind and you're not inclined to learn because you already know or you don't want to show your weakness so those kind of things, details are what I'm looking into someone who comes to Le Bernardin and there's a lot of other things, I mean obviously they have to

be very clean they have to be honest I mean those are of course like the ABC of hiring someone. But again, being a team player, it's, in my opinion, one of the most important things

for someone to become a good line cook. I'm not saying a chef. I make a difference in between a line cook and a chef. A chef is a manager and it's someone who has the capability of driving a team to success and who creates, hopefully, his own recipes and has many other responsibilities in the kitchen. The line cook is basically the core of a chef. It's without being a great line cook, without mastering all the aspects or a lot of the

aspects of what's happening in the kitchen, you cannot become a good manager. You cannot become a chef. And when you're trying to identify someone who is a good team player, do you do that by asking certain questions? Do you do it by throwing them into a shift and test driving them and seeing how they respond to certain situations? How do you figure out who is going to be a good team player? Because I would imagine you don't want to test it when a lot is on the line, when you have an entirely full restaurant. That's not the time to experiment with it. So how do you determine if they're a team player or not?

So first of all, we look at the resumes when they are sent to us or the cooks are sent by a culinary school or by another chef. They have a lot of good recommendations. And what we do, we invite them to come in our kitchen on a Saturday night because it's a busy night and it's also the end of the week and we like to have them. And we don't have too many at the same time, but two or three potential hires in our kitchen and and we said to them look we give you a menu and we gonna put you in a kitchen in some different spots and you look

you're gonna observe and then at the end of the night we will have a little talk with you because what we really want is for you to like what you see and want to be part of that team that's working tonight. And therefore, it's very light on them. They don't have any pressure. They don't have anything to do but to observe. At the same time, what they don't realize is that we are watching them as well. For instance, if I see someone two hours into the service putting his hands in a pocket and starting to lean against the wall and starting to yawn, it's not a good sign. If I see someone starting to bother the cooks by asking hundreds of questions

when it's a really, really difficult time of the night and the cooks need to be concentrated, I know that person is not understanding what's happening. So it's a lot of little details like that. And then at the end of the service, we sit down with them and we ask them what they think and we and then if they have a positive answer and they say well look i i like your kitchen i want to be with you uh then we we go more into details technical details of of what we expect

from them and we make them come back again and we put them in a station with someone and they don't have any responsibilities, but they feel a little bit of the pressure and it's a very slow process before we hire them. Do you fire quickly? And we're not going to stay on hiring and firing the whole time, don't worry. But do you hire really slowly and fire quickly or do you give people many different opportunities if they make mistakes? No, we don't fire easily. It's very rare that we fire someone. It's very rare that someone also leaves almost immediately after being hired because of the process.

Because we are slow at hiring, they understand better who we are and they understand better if we are good for them. And therefore, we don't have to deal with those painful consequences that are having someone leaving or have to let someone go. So I'm going to switch gears just a little bit. Well, actually completely. But the details, the little details, I love the allowing to observe but observing them simultaneously. So I'd love to talk about a very different type of detail.

And this might be outdated, but I read about your office at one point. And this is a piece from 2005, so it may not be accurate, but could you describe what your office looks like or what makes your office different, perhaps, than what people might think of as a normal office? And it's a leading question, so I can certainly read what I have, but I'd love for you to describe your office, if you could. Well, my office looks like a monastery, like a Buddhist monastery, with Buddha statues everywhere, tankas, pictures of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, pictures of Buddhas, mantras, candles, a lot of them, probably way too many.

And it's one table that I share with Cathy, who's my right hand, and we basically face each other. And then we have another lady in office, Chelsea, who's working with us for different aspects of the duties. But I always ask them permission. And if I can bring another painting or another tanka or Buddha, and I ask them if they're comfortable with that. If not, I would remove them because I don't want to impose on them. And it's interesting because they laugh all the time, but when I remove one Buddha,

they complain about it. And I remove Buddhas because I'm not, being a Buddhist, you're not supposed to be attached. And obviously, it's a form of attachment. And therefore,

I try to give Buddhas to my friends who accept a Buddha, who are happy to receive a Buddha from me. If not, I move them to my house, although I think we are maxed out at the house. And actually my wife had a funny line the other day. She said, what do you think about me bringing, because she's Catholic, bringing some Christ on the cross and putting them all over the walls? And I said, yeah, you're right. Maybe I should move some Buddhas out of the house as well. And the, well, two questions.

You mentioned a word, and I apologize. I couldn't make it out. Tanka? Is that the word that you used tankas are religious paintings that are rolled to travel and then you put them you you put them against the wall and it's basically usually a painting of a deity or a buddha that has has the role to help you in meditation or to inspire you. It's not just for decoration. And do you still have handwritten mantras or mantras around the office or elsewhere in your life well so i at home what i have done to to avoid the

discussion of putting too many buddhas everywhere i have a meditation room that is basically my world and and nobody's telling me um what to put in it or not put it inside the room. So I manage that pretty well. And then again, the office is a work in progress. What are some of the handwritten mantras that you have around? Or any that are particularly important to you that you tend to revisit? I don't know uh i don't know i don't even know where to begin but i'm i'm extremely curious because i have quotes that i put around my house for instance one on the refrigerator one on the coffee table because

i think they're important for me to revisit and i'm very fascinated by this this handwritten mantra idea well the mantras that i have are either way in tibetan or sanskrit but my and i'm not sure i understand fully the the full extent of the power of the mantra but probably the most powerful that i have on the wall is a mantra that explained the theory of emptiness in in buddhism which is basically that nothing nothing in in life or in this world which is called samsara as an intrinsic reality which means is independent from anything else. In Buddhism, we believe that everything is a matter of cause and consequences, and everything is interrelated.

So that mantra is basically reminding and proving the point that nothing exists by itself, and we are all one, if it makes sense. It does. It makes more sense, probably requires a little bit of wine and a longer conversation, but no, no, no, it does make a lot of sense to me. I'd love to rewind the clock a little bit and we're definitely going to come back to meditation. Certainly at one point, But from my understanding, perhaps it was about two decades ago,

you were a very demanding chef. And I think you referred to yourself as a dictator or a borderline violent dictator. Yes. And I agree. I was. And you were losing employees. Could you tell us about that period of time? Because changes you made or what realizations you had?

Yes, of course. I was trained in Europe at a very young age in kitchens, where the way to educate a cook was through abuse and humiliation. And the belief was, we're going to break this person, and then we're going to rebuild potentially a champion. So it was allowed in the kitchen to beat the cooks, like kick them in the butt or beat them in the shoulders or even, you know, like punching the cooks and so on. In many kitchens, it was allowed and it a common practice, it was everywhere and totally accepted to have a chef being screaming, insulting the cooks and having tantrum in the kitchen and throwing pans in the garbage and plates on the floor. And it was seen as a sign of power. And I learned later on in life

that it's actually, it's embarrassing. It's a huge sign of weakness. But it was the way many kitchens were training their cooks in Europe. And it was actually a reflection of the education in the society. It was totally accepted in the 1970s when I was five years old to have the education in the society. It was totally accepted in the 1970s when I was five years old

to have the teacher in school spanking or smacking or pulling the ears of a student. It was totally acceptable for parents to certainly do the same. And therefore, ultimately, in a work environment, we will see those kind of abuse. Then, when I came to the US, I was convinced that it was the right way to maintain a kitchen,

maintain discipline, to create some strong people, a little bit almost like you will do with the militaries during the time of war when you have to be training them to be ready to die, I guess, or to fight until the last minute. So that was my mentality. And when I became the chef of Le Bernardin, or even sous- I was sous chef in Washington, D.C. at the Watergate Hotel, I had those terrible tantrums in the kitchen because the quality wouldn scared of me and the cooks were scared of me. And I was losing the staff. They were going to work somewhere else. And I remember not understanding why they were leaving.

I thought I was doing a good job trying to educate them. But ultimately, I had to one day sit down at home and started to reflect on my life as a professional and on my life in general. And I realized that I was miserable. I was not happy at all. And I realized that actually your brain cannot mix happiness and anger at the same time. And I can tell you anyone can try to be happy and angry. The brain doesn't process that. Therefore, I decided almost overnight to change the way I was managing the kitchen, the way I was conducting my life. And since then, it has been a work in progress and I'm getting better and better. And I make sure that our kitchen is an environment

where people are happy to come and are motivated and excited to learn what they're supposed to learn. And the biggest job that I have, and that was at the time, is to convince my sous chefs that yesterday we were wrong and we have to change. The sous chefs were like, what's happening to you? You completely change. And it has been a long journey for me to convince the sous chefs that the way to educate people and to motivate people, it's being inspirational, being kind, being strong and keeping a certain discipline in the kitchen without promoting abuse.

Was there a particular moment that triggered that change in you? Because I imagine, for instance, not all the employees left at the same time. There are probably different events, different happenings. Was there a particular conversation or a particular book or a particular employee who left that was just this straw that broke the camel's back when you realized that something had to change? No, you know what happened? It was very interesting because I knew I was miserable. And I would close my eyes, mostly at home, after work. And I would try to envision something nice, something that would make me smile or something that would make me happy. So I would close my eyes and I would say, choose something simple.

Envision a field of flowers or envision a flower for instance. And I was not capable to imagine a simple flower. It was all darkness. And that freaked me out. Because you were so angry. Because I was in a darkness. And that is what triggered the change in me it was not necessarily an employee that was fired a certain way uh it was it was that moment uh sitting down or laying down i don't remember but saying oh my god i am incapable of visualizing anything beautiful and therefore i must be uh in total darkness wow yeah that sounds terrifying not anymore not anymore yeah now you now you seem like you're able to uh what what did you

say or do to convince your uh i i suppose sort of second, third in command, the sous chefs, that it was necessary and to get them to go along with it. How did you convince them? Because I can imagine that overnight regime change, you know, they're wondering if you somehow snuck off to Burning Man for a night or something and aren't sure what happened. How did you get them to buy in? What did you say to them? Yes, and I still have to do that because some of them have a temper and some sous-chefs are joining our team and they come from other teams that are different and come from a different environment that is much more abusive than at Le Bernardin. So it's a constant communication with them. I basically say, look, for practical reasons, forget the spiritual reason, forget being nice for the act of being nice. shake and he loses cool and he cannot focus that cook will not be productive the way we need him to

be productive and ultimately the product that will go to the dining room to the client will not be as nice so on that aspect it's easy to understand that we want the cooks not to be scared. And they have to be precise and they have to be pushed, of course, because it's a timing issue, but they have to be pushed in a nice way so they feel part of the team. Now, the other day I had a discussion with a couple of sous chefs and I said I was trying to find a secular message for them that would resonate to them and that they would understand easily.

Because I always try to not bring my Buddhist philosophy into the kitchen, except through secular ways. So I said to them, I said, why don't you treat people the way you want to be treated? And I think it's actually in the Bible somewhere. But I told them that. I said, look, you like when I talk to you nicely.

You like when I am taking the time and patient with you, and you like interacting with me, and knowing that I'm a gentle soul. And you don't like if I raise my voice, which is very rare. And you don't like if you see my face looking frustrated. So if you don't like that, why do you think someone else is going to like what you do? So please treat others the way you want to be pleased the way you want to be treated and that really um had a good impact they understood that really well and it was a good meeting uh that day and uh and i have to say, I mean, I believe 90% of the time or 99% of the time our kitchen is a very good environment to blossom. But of course, we have our moments.

Of course, sometimes the challenge is so strong that someone loses it, especially in a position of command, including myself. And in that case, I have also an antidote for that. It's, okay, if we lose it and it's happening and the kitchen stops and the cooks are terrorized or frustrated, what we have to do is we have to wait a few minutes until the end of the service, and then we have to go in front of the entire staff and genuinely apologize for being angry and expressing it by potentially screaming

or any way of showing anger. And I say, if we do that, the cooks will forgive us, I believe. And it will also, for us, be a good lesson because it's never pleasant to go on the front of a team and apologize for a mistake. And it's happening. Now I see like some sous chefs chefs sometimes they lose their temper and uh minutes later they go and say look i am i'm sorry i i apologize for for my behavior and uh let's let's finish the night in a better way and even myself this week i remember i was frustrated with the sommelier who was spending too much time at the table explaining the wine and the food getting cold.

And I called him and I had a couple of rough words with him. And immediately I realized and I said, look, I'm totally sorry, but please do not do that because our food is getting cold. I apologize for raising my voice. And he laughs and he says, take it easy. It's all good. I'm a big boy. But still, I made the effort to do that. And when you are trying to strike a balance between, say, kindness and the golden rule that you mentioned,

treat others as you would have them treat you, and extremely high quality. As you've given the examples, of course, it doesn't mean that you're just running around giving everybody hugs all night. You certainly give feedback. What are some of the approaches or learnings that you've had in striking that balance? Because as I'm listening to you talk about your history with sort of being brought up in a very tough environment, I was also coached in sports very often in ways that were similar, extremely, extremely similar, particularly during my time in Japan where they would actually cut, there's a kendo sword. And in some of the gyms

I went to, they would cut off the top of the kendo sword so that it splayed out almost. And then they would hit athletes who were training. If they did something incorrectly, cut their ears and it would cause all sorts of, I mean, the Japanese are very intense that way as well as some of their schools of Zen meditation are also involve a lot of physical abuse. But the point being that I had a lot of trouble about maybe five years ago, a little bit earlier with realizing how unproductive the anger was that I had adopted as a way of interacting with people when I was in a bad place. And so I've struggled with, to be honest, getting better at managing people.

And I think I've improved a lot in the last few years. But how have you, I know it's a lot of context, but are there certain things that you've found helpful for finding that line of really high quality but still returning to a place of kindness? Yes, I think it's important to find tools to fight anger. Now, anger doesn't help to create quality. Quality has nothing to do or standards of quality at Le Bernardin have nothing to do with anger. we basically bring the person to the to the pass which is the table where we we check the food and we pinpoint what's wrong about it and we say look you made a mistake right here and right here go do it again um and we say that really like in a in a kind way without saying please go take your time and do it again we said we just say go do it again but in a kind way without saying, please go take your time and do it again. We just say, go do it again, but in a nice way.

And we do that all night long. So it's not something exceptional about it. And the cooks have the habit of saying yes and taking the plate that has a mistake on and bringing it back again the way we want it. So that's what's happening. But it's important to tame anger with the right tools. So first of all, I think it's important to analyze what anger does to someone. Like for myself, I realized that anger, it's something that, it's a very strong force

that comes from the guts almost and comes up. It's the way I feel it in processing anger. And that strong, very strong force has a tremendous power of course but that force is blind it's not a rational

way, it doesn't make you rational it makes you completely unaware of the consequences of what that force makes you do so for instance you may very well insult someone like you mentioned japan they beat people in some with some athletes or something like that if it comes from anger it's not it's impossible to control. And the consequences are basically negative, obviously.

And then when you come down and when the anger is gone, suddenly you're like, wow, what did I do? My God, it was not necessary. So analyzing that or making that exercise of contemplation towards someone who has anger or toward yourself it's important and then i use the tool of meditation for anger um very often and for instance a very easy meditation for anyone at home is to visualize anger as a dark cloud coming out of yourself and imagining a laser coming out of your forehead and destroying the dark cloud. And if you do that every day, thinking that the anger is a dark cloud, I can guarantee you that one day

the anger is coming and you have almost like this Pavlov reflex of saying, oh my God, it's the dark cloud. And instead of letting anger go and blind you, you destroy that anger and would you suggest them doing this visualization this meditation say in the morning or is it is it a tool that they use whenever they start to sense the physical symptoms of anger or both well it's both because you i believe that um when you do meditation it's better to

do it on the morning because your mind is clear usually or clearer uh you don't have all the uh all the distraction of the day uh all the actions that you have done that will potentially distract you during your meditation. Morning meditations are, in my opinion, much more productive. And then, like I mentioned before, when you get angry, after many meditations on on that dark cloud again you remember and it's when you apply it what what does your current meditation

practice look like and we can definitely get into the details on this podcast it's just been fascinating in the last few years to see that of all of the people I interview who operate at a high level in any field, I would say more than 85% have some type of mindfulness practice or meditation practice. And it takes many, many different forms. But I'd love to hear specifically what your meditation practice looks like, what time you do it in the morning. If you could just walk us through, in the case of a morning meditation, what do the first 60 minutes or an hour of your day look like? Those are the same, I guess. 60 minutes or 90 minutes of the day look like for you?

I like to have my day, it's very repetitive. It's like a pattern i follow a pattern so i wake up and i force myself because i always forget to be grateful to be alive um and then what time do you typically wake up six o'clock 6 30 7 o'clock if i rarely eight o'clock uh i mean it's yeah it's i mean for me it's pretty early um after that i look at my phone i quickly look at the news on the phone and messages and things like that, but it doesn't take too much. After that, I go make my coffee. Then I go to my meditation room and I do some rituals, Buddhist rituals.

I make some offerings. I read a little bit. I say some mantras. And then I start my meditation. And when I start the meditation, I don't even sit in a lotus position because I find it a distraction for me because my knees hurt and my back hurt, and I'm not that flexible. So therefore, I sit straight but comfortable comfortable and i start to look

at the room and and i look at the details of the room and then i close my eyes and i do what we call shamatha shamatha meditation is basically being in the present and controlling your mind and not letting the mind think about the past or think about the future or start to be judgmental. We call that avoiding a monkey mind. Monkey mind is when you're not in control of your mind, but your mind is in control of yourself.

That exercise can be done by focusing on the way you inspire and excel. Many people do that. For myself, it's a little bit different. When I inhale, I feel the energy coming from the first chakra, which is basically the middle of your butt. And the energy going up to the seventh chakra, which is on top of the head, right? And then when I exhale exhale the energy goes down it looks like it's almost like a tube in my back that um carry the energy up and carry the energy down so i do that for few minutes and i don't count the minutes because i don't want to be distracted by

oh my god how many minutes am I going to do 10 minutes? Or am I going to do only five minutes today? Or what am I going to do? So I don't put pressure on myself. What is important is not the quantity in terms of timing, it's the quality. Then when I feel that I am really in the present and in control of my mind, I decide which meditation I'm going to do. Very often they are meditations that are linked to Buddhism. But sometimes it can be a meditation that is universal and secular, like, for instance, visualizing a weakness and finding a way to destroy that weakness. So it can be anger, it can be jealousy, it can be attachment, it can be anything. anything but i always end up by doing the 12 link meditation which is typically a buddhist

meditation from the vajrayana school which is buddha tibetan buddhism 12 link l-i-n-k got it and how and i know you're not counting the minutes, but typically, how long do you do that for? It probably takes about, in between shamatha and vipassana, which is guided meditation, and shamatha being single-point meditation, it's when you basically control your brain, and then it's when you, with your brain, concentrate on different subjects in between both meditations it must be about 25 minutes half hour maximum not more than that then i read again and then sometimes i meditate again if i have time but that's basically the about two hours of my time on a morning is in between doing the ritual that I, uh, that I just explained to you. I have quite a few questions about this because I love the details and my listeners love the details. And I'm also about to do my first silent retreat for 10 days. So I'm thinking a lot

about something. I'm thinking a lot about this. I think it's part of the medicine I need. We all need something. I think this is part of what I need. And I'm going to get to the meditation in detail, but just for people who may not have ever experienced something like this or attempted anything like this, what are some of the benefits that you see from this or perhaps a different way to answer it would be what were you like before this type of practice and how are you different now meditation ultimately help you to train your mind how to concentrate in a better way. Helps you to control, like I mentioned before, your mind. If not, the mind is something that is very free and very lack discipline.

And so it's the only way for you to be in control of yourself and it's the best way for yourself to concentrate and to if you are studying some philosophical subjects to go to the roots of the subjects that's's what meditation does. It also, I believe, helps you to be calmer. Is calmer an English word? I don't think so. Calm, to be calm. Oh, calmer, calmer, yes.

Sorry, calmer, okay. To be, yeah, to be much more serene, let's put it this way. And it doesn't happen overnight. And meditation, very often in the beginning, it's frustrating and it's not pleasureful. It's a challenge. But then after a lot of practice,

it becomes a necessity. It becomes kind of a refuge for yourself. And it's a lot of pleasure coming out of it. I'm going to, I really appreciate that. And I'm going to come back to, also for people who are listening and are just like, oh my God, woo woo, meditation, Buddhism, like save me. Because I know a lot of type A personalities do that, which is what I did not too, too long ago. I remember I was listening to someone being interviewed on stage who used to have a lot of anger issues and they seem to have resolved a lot of them through

meditation. And somebody asked them how long they meditate. And they said, well, usually it's about 30 minutes. And they said, oh, I could never sit still for 30 minutes. And they said, Well, if you if you can't meditate for 30 minutes, you need three hours. Generally, the harder it is for you, the more you need it. And, but going back to the beginning of your day, I'd love to and hopefully this isn't irritating for you. But just to go through each of these and ask a few questions. So the grateful to be alive, is that something you say to yourself? Is that a feeling? Is it just listening to the world around you? What exactly do you do when you wake up and remind yourself of that?

So I wake up and when my mind wakes up, it's not like I am confused. I know where I am. I am in my bed. I'm aware of that. I have this sense of awareness. But I try to have my first thoughts dedicated to the fact that I am alive and I'm lucky to be alive because it gives me many possibilities to be a better person,

to have an impact on other people, to also have a good day in front of me, and so on. So it's something that I'm doing right right away and it's not like i'm thinking about it for 10 minutes it's a very quick uh thought it's few seconds thinking about it and say wow i'm lucky thank you i'm i'm appreciating the fact that i'm waking up today and I am alive. So the next thing you do, I was actually fascinated that you drink coffee before you meditate, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I've just actually never come across it with an experienced meditator yet.

I'm sure that you're not the only one. What type, just because I have to ask since you have so much culinary expertise, what is your go-to coffee? What type of coffee, how do you make it? So first of all, it's decaf coffee. So it's no caffeine involved. And that helps me, I guess, a lot for my meditation. And I'm not in charge of buying the coffee. It's my wife who goes to the store and buys quality coffee from different countries.

But she knows my taste after so many years. And I don't know where it's coming from, but it always tastes the same. So I cannot, I cannot tell you the origin of the coffee. Do you use a machine? Do you use a Chemex? Do you have any particular, I know this is getting nerdy, but I'm wondering if it's like super simple. I actually know some, some really, really good chefs who love instant coffee. And then I know some who will do a 10-minute pour-over and hand-grind the beans and do all of that.

So where are you in that spectrum? The beans are hand-grind, like you mentioned. I'm using a Mr. Coffee machine. Got it. Okay, cool. Actually, you know, the coffee comes very very hot and i don't like hot coffee but it gives for the coffee to to be a bit warmer and then uh then and then i it takes me about at least 15 minutes to drink my cup of coffee actually it's a's a mug. But it takes me about 15 minutes.

And really, the coffee for me becomes very pleasurable in terms of temperature in the last five minutes of the process. I like that. I like that you deliberately have coffee that's too hot because you can't rush. Exactly. Or you'll hurt yourself. Yeah. or you'll hurt yourself yeah and uh you you then go into your meditation room you make

some offerings yes uh which which uh maybe we can we can do in a part two podcast because i i want to talk about the reading what what do you read because you you do the offering you read then you have mantras then meditation and then you also read yes as a bookend at the end of the session what are you reading or what do you like to read i mostly read uh buddhist texts or books from masters or ancient masters and from modern teachers and mostly teachings from His Holiness the Dalai Lama. That's what I read. Are there any particular chapters or books that you would recommend to someone if they wanted to start somewhere?

Yeah, of course, you have always like Buddhism for dummies, but I don't recommend it. I think studying the Four Noble Truths with someone like the Dalai Lama, it's a good idea because it's a very interesting and simple approach to Buddhism. It's the realization that, so the Four Noble Truths basically are, was the first teaching of Buddha after he got enlightened.

And it's the realization that in life, at one point or another, life is made of suffering. And that suffering, so that's the first truth. The second truth is that suffering has an origin. So basically, let's suppose you have a big headache and where is the headache coming from? A suffering? Maybe last night you had a bit too much tequila.

Something like that. I mean, I'm taking this example, but it could be anything, right? I mean, I'm trying to be funny with that. But it's to identify the root of suffering because suffering cannot exist by itself without a previous condition. Then it's to say, well,

if I don't want to have that suffering again, I have to stop creating the conditions that leads to that suffering. So that's the third noble truth. And the fourth noble truth is the path of liberation from suffering, which is basically following the teaching of Buddha. And the path of liberation is very simple. You can draw a circle, and it's called the Eightfold Path.

I think it's Eightfold in English, Path of Liberation. So basically it's eight recommendations from Buddha, which are very, very simple, because again, it was his first teaching, and not necessarily to some people who were very knowledgeable in Buddhism. So the first thing to say to yourself is, I trust the teaching of Buddha, and I will question everything about the teaching, but if it makes sense to me, I will trust the teaching and study. The second thing is to say to yourself,

while studying is not good enough, I have to practice having good thoughts during my journey, then having a good speech, therefore having good actions. Then it's having a job that is not in contradiction with the teaching of Buddha. You cannot be in a mafia and kill people and be a Buddhist. It doesn't work. and then it's to say well i'm gonna do the right efforts every day to implement all of the above and become a better person and then it's to say well i'm gonna practice concentration to be able to to achieve that goal because it requires a lot of concentration.

And then it's to achieve wisdom and use that wisdom for good reasons. So this is the Four Noble Truths. Thank you very much for that and I'd love to maybe it's within the context of those truths and trying to follow those truths or not I don't know but in your process where you do offerings reading mantras are the mantras in English or in another language or in French or otherwise no the mantras are in Sanskrit or in Tibetan sometimes. But for instance, the mantra of emptiness,

I can tell you now and I don't think you're going to understand much. And I'm not sure I understand fully the mantra, but it's So I say that mantra many, many times. I have a manla, which is basically like a bracelet with pearls, little pearls. You have 108 pearls, each of them representing a teaching of Buddha. And you repeat that 108 times if you have the time to do it if not you do you do it

three times and and you try to uh understand the mantra like for instance emptiness is it's a very very important um part of buddhism um that explain all phenomenons of of life um and i can i i mean we can go into details of it if you want but it's going to take an hour well given given the time constraints we have today but i can i can tell you i mean very quickly let's you know like for instance you can you can have a a page of paper on the front of you and it is a page of paper on the front of you, and it is a page of paper. You do not deny the fact that it is a page of paper. Now, for you, it's a page of paper,

but for someone else who has never seen a page of paper, it could be something to like the fire, or it could be some other interpretation. So whatever you think of is not necessarily the ultimate truth. It's just your interpretation. is made of wood that was once a seed in the ground that became a tree after years of rain and wind and sun and night. That piece of paper, if you go further, is made of particles, atoms, and smaller particles. And ultimately, the piece of paper that you have on the front of you is, yes, a piece of paper, but it's much more than that.

You and I have a lot to talk about, my friend. Believe me, I'm a student trying to explain to you what I understand. I am not, I'm definitely not considering myself a teacher. Well, speaking of teachers, just, and then I'm going to keep zooming in and out. I'm going to come back to visualizing weakness, because I'd love to get a real world example from you of a weakness you were working on and what you did. But before we get there, just as perhaps a jumping off point for people who are curious about this. So there are a few books, I grew up with a very strong aversion to religion of all types or anything I considered organized religion. And we don't have time to psychoanalyze that right now, but suffice to say that that is something I have carried for a very long time.

So I had a visceral knee-jerk resistance to anything that had, almost anything that had an ism at the end of it, if that makes sense. And then there were a few books that were introduced to me that had a tremendous impact. And maybe thinkers is another way to put it so the the first was from and i don't know how i came across it but it was a book written by tiknot han who was nominated for the nobel peace prize by dr martin luther king jr yes exactly and uh it was, it was one of the two, because I ended up reading both, but The Miracle of Mindfulness or Peace is Every Step. And I remember there was one example,

not to make this about me, but it might be helpful to people out there. One example, and I don't know which book it was in, it was in one of the two that really stuck with me for decades now, is he talked about how, and this is an example of how mindfulness can actually help you, right? At least in my mind, I was like, oh, wow, that actually makes perfect sense. And it was, if you're washing the dishes after a meal, and you're going to reward yourself with, I think it was a plum. And the whole time

you're washing the dishes, you're thinking about the plum. You're thinking about the plum. When you eat the plum, you're not going to enjoy the plum because you'll be thinking about whatever is coming after the plum. And I was like, oh my God, that's so simple, but it makes a lot of sense. So Thich Nhat Hanh and then also also Tara Brock wrote a book called Radical Acceptance. It's a very boring title, but it is one of the things that perhaps more than anything else, particularly after my first real television experience, which was very, very difficult on everyone. It was the suicide mission of sorts. I mean, the schedule, everything was extremely, extremely difficult. And I lost my temper a few times at not generally people in the field,

but usually with editing team. And I was very ashamed of that, very unproud of that. And this book really helped me to, I think, radical acceptance, reconcile a lot of what was just gnawing at me on the inside or causing that to come out at really bad times. And I bring up those books because when you and I have had some interaction electronically, and I'm very excited to have you in the new book that's coming out, not too far out, Tribe of Mentors. So thank you for that. Sharon Salzberg and a bunch of really wonderful people are in there. You mentioned the Dalai Lama's 100 Elephants on a Blade of Grass.

And you also had the French, which I'm not going to try to pronounce because it'll sound terrible when I try it. Uh, but was, was that your, was that the book that made the difference for you in terms of exploring these types of subjects? Or was there something that you found first and how did you find the book? No, it was this book for sure. Uh, and I still have the book of course, which is out of print because it's from 1989. That book was sent to me by my mother. I was living in Washington, D.C., and I had previously read a book in a plane coming to America to live permanently in America,

a book about Tibet and about Buddhism. And I was interested, but I was a bit confused. But something was interesting about it. How did you find that first book? So I was at the airport and... This was in France. Yes, I was about to go into the plane and I had 10 francs,

which is the equivalent of $2 or a bit less. And I mean, francs do not exist anymore now as euros, but at the time it was about that much. And I was tempted to buy Playboy magazine. It's natural, healthy young man. And I actually went and grabbed the playboy and then i saw that book about tibet that was that was um somewhere in the in in the airport and and i look at it and it was the same price and i said oh my god i'm interested because i always was curious about tibet it looks

like it's it's we don't know much about that country and so on. So I said, oh, I'm going to buy the Tibetan book. And then I got the book and then I went back to the Playboy and I dropped the book. And then I was paying for the Playboy and

at the last second I said to the lady, no, please, I'm sorry, I'm taking the book and I put back the Playboy where it belongs. And that was my first interest in Buddhism and in Tibetan culture. It's hard to make proper use of a Playboy on an airplane. Well, the interviews are always very good. So I interrupted those so you read that book and then your mother sent you yes i said to her i said look can you try to find me something interesting about buddhism and tibet and maybe it's it's someone a master or i didn't know the dalai lama at the the time. I had no idea. And she found that book and sent it to me.

And the beginning of the book is the speech that he made when he got the Peace Nobel Prize. And that speech really moved me tremendously. It was a brilliant, brilliant, compassionate speech that he made. And after that, I read, of course, the rest of the book, which touched different aspects of Buddhism. But ultimately, I understood that Buddhism can be three things at the same time. And it's why it's so appealing today to a lot of people, because Buddhism can be a religion, if you wish. It can be also purely a philosophy. And it can be also, all the theory of Buddhism can be proven by science, especially quantum physics or quantum mechanics. So you have three ways to embrace the philosophy of Buddhism,

one being totally secular, and I think it's actually probably the future of Buddhism is to be proven by science, and quantum mechanics is the best way to prove the theory, or philosophically by debating and by analyzing, you can prove the many theories of Buddhism, and then, of course, you can always follow the religious path, which it's not fighting the fact that it's a science and it's a philosophy as well. It's just complementary. And some people are purely religious. Some people are purely scientific about it, and some people are using the three aspects of that philosophy.

One thing that also brought me back into the orbit of Buddhism, and I wouldn't call myself a Buddhist in the same way that people are like, oh, are you a surfer? I'm like, no, no, no. I surf very, very poorly, but I would never call myself a surfer, right? I wouldn't self-identify that way. I'm very interested in reading different books on, say, Buddhism, mostly in the secular capacity. Sure. And it should be like that. mostly in the secular capacity. And in part because a branch of philosophy called Stoicism, I can effectively say saved my life on at least one occasion, probably more.

One of the quotes I have on my refrigerator is from Marcus Aurelius. So the Stoic thinkers, particularly Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, the most famous book by the last being Meditations, have a lot of overlap with secular Buddhism. They're almost entirely compatible. I can't think of one thing that comes to mind that is contradictory and so the sort of the greeks and the romans brought me back to buddhism to expand my thinking about how to become more self-aware and less emotionally reactive and there's there's very well i shouldn't say very little, but if we're looking at secular Stoicism, because you can get into cosmology and some really weird stuff, then there isn't a ton to work with in terms of original writings over many, many centuries and different cultures also, which is interesting to me to look at the different breeds, so to speak. But what I've noticed in Silicon Valley is that both Stoicism and Buddhism here, I'm sitting in San Francisco,

become more popular because I think in part, you can take engineers who may be by default more secular and give them a toolkit to help with navigating life. And I was having a conversation with a gentleman named Jerry Colonna, uh, who, uh, in a former life, a very, very successful technology investor among other things and now works with executives at a lot of the technology companies that people would recognize and one of the questions that he likes to ask which is perfectly you don't have to be a buddhist to ask this type of question but it happens to relate is and i'm going to paraphrase here but how are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don't want? Right? So how are you contributing to creating the conditions that you say you don't want, which

seems to come right back to the noble truths and so on that you were talking about. But the weakness, visualizing weakness is very interesting to me. So I want to make sure I come back to that briefly. We can bounce around, certainly. But when you're going through your meditation and you're visualizing weakness, can you give us an example of a weakness, past or current, that you've visualized and what that process looks like in your mind? Yes. before i go to that i like to to say one thing that is uh very interesting to me about buddhism is that it's not a dogmatic religion or philosophy at all and actually even buddha himself buddha means basically the enlightened one right uh but but his name was shakyamuni. Shakyamuni himself said, please, please, please, please.

It's not because I am respected and I am supposedly enlightened that you should take every word I say for truthful. Please analyze everything I say and reject everything that doesn't make sense in my speech, in my actions, in my theories. Do not take the dogma as it is. Question everything.

And today when you study Buddhism, your teachers, they very, very articulate in making sure that you do that. And they test you making sure that you do not do not do not accept anything they say because they are supposedly your teacher or supposedly pure or anything like that so that's very interesting to me that you have to reject whatever doesn't make sense to yourself. Now, going back to the weakness, weakness are coming from ignorance. And ignorance is basically the root of all weaknesses. And we basically consider in Buddhism three poisons of of the mind which are coming from ignorance one of the the

first one is um attachment and unhealthy desire and then anger is a anger is very powerful poison of the mind as well and that comes from ignorance so let's say attachment let's take the the subject of attachment so i could be attached to many things and i am during the day actually i mean look the man who's talking to you right now is eric repair is a simple man who's trying to be a good guy and who failed many times in his vision. I'm not talking to you as a master here. I'm a student. I'm trying every day to fight anger, to fight attachment and ignorance. So therefore, saying that, if I take attachment as a subject, I'm trying to see where I am attached the most. Is it the power? Is it the glory?

Is it the money? Is it the glory? Is it the money? Is it something else? And then I decide that today I'm going to focus on the fact that I'm attached to my reputation as a great chef. And I'm very, potentially that can bring to a very insecure reaction toward that. And I can be very attached, so much attached to my reputation of a four-star chef and a three-star chef Michelin or international chef, whatever it is. And that is definitely something that is negative. So when I identify the subject that I want to fight, I basically concentrate and say, why are you so attached to be someone of potential, like being a celebrity, for instance? What does it do what is it what does it do for you what is how good is it for you what what happened if you lose that what what will be the consequence of of losing that and and how important is it in your life compared to being healthy and being a compassionate person and so on.

And when you analyze the subject, you realize that suddenly if you attach to your title, which actually when you actually die, stays here and you die and your title doesn't exist anymore, so it's not even meaningful on the long term uh when i identify that that weakness which is attachment in this instance uh i say okay well i'm gonna visualize because i have i want to make it simple for my mind to fight. I'm going to visualize that as something. And for me, I mean, for you could be something else,

but it could be a rock, a stone, it could be anything. For me, I always go to the dark cloud because for some reason it works in my mind. I see a dark cloud and I'm like, this dark cloud is my attachment to my title and to what I'm supposed to represent and I am going to get rid of it. And I have decided that probably because

I read a lot of books from Star Wars, I mean, watched Star Wars and read a lot of comic books and so on. So I am the guy who has the laser in his forehead. I have that power of destroying that cloud and saying, well, that cloud is full of attachment to something that is not meaningful at the end of the day. At the end of the day, it's not important. And I'm destroying and I'm destroying and destroying and destroying.

And doing that repetitively creates, basically, like I said before, like the Pavlov reflex. As soon as I'm going to have doubts about losing what I have built in terms of reputation, I'm going to think about, is it really important in my life? Can I give it away? And I realized that it is not important in my life, and I can give it away easily. And then suddenly, boom, the cloud, I visualize the cloud, and I destroy it,

and I don't have that fear anymore of losing, of being attached. That's my way of doing it. I'm not sure it's the perfect way. I'm not sure it works for everybody. But for me, it's the way I do it. And it's very simple when you think about it. So simplicity, and maybe simplicity isn't the right word.

Maybe elegance isn't the right word in terms of few moving pieces, but that, you know, maybe it's like the duck on the surface where it's extremely calm and then you don't see the feet kicking like hell underneath. I don't know. But the question I wanted to ask you is related to attachment. So many people in the culinary world are attached to, and this is true everywhere, but money and growth. And particularly with the profile that you have, you must get approached to do huge chains and dozens of this and hundreds of that. You must be sent opportunities like that all the time i mean i would imagine it has to happen every week uh how have you thought about making decisions about sort of quality versus scale yes well i am not naive i mean i am not that naive

and i understand the benefits of being wealthy that comes usually from working hard and developing businesses and so on or sometimes it comes from some other directions, but wealth definitely contributes to happiness, but ultimately we know it doesn't bring happiness and inner strength, inner happiness. So you have to, I mean, in my case, I decided that I had to find my level of contentment. And what was my level of contentment? So I created it.

And I said, look, my level of contentment is that I have a very successful restaurant in New York that makes me very happy, that creates jobs for 160 families and we work as a team to make our clients happy to create experiences for people who come here and we live from that and now I live pretty well and I'm trying to give a good lifestyle and good income to everyone who is in the company. Of course, relative to their position and to the responsibility that they have. I mean, not everybody has the same compensations, but I think like that. And then I look at my life and I'm like, you know, I'm very lucky in this life. First of all, so far I think I am healthy. I'm not starving.

I'm not in a war. I have a happy family surrounding me, supporting me. I have a team that seems to like me. And in terms of money, I eat well. I'm traveling when I need to travel. I have the pair of sneakers that I like. I have a pair of jeans. I have a T-shirt.

I have what it's called. I have sweaters and so on. How many of that do I need? How many houses do I need? How much money do I need in a bank? And when I'm going to leave this world, everything is going to stay here. I'm not taking anything with me. So how much

sacrifices I have to make to accumulate wealth that are worth it or not. And I realized that for myself, Le Bernardin, and we have another restaurant in Cayman Island with the Ritz-Carlton called Blue Bioric Repair. And I'm consulting there.

But it's very low maintenance for me. It's mostly the team, the teams, both teams that work together with my mentorship but i i said to myself look if you open another restaurant in vegas and one in dubai and one in hong kong singapore whatever and accept accept all those those offers suddenly your lifestyle is going to change um you're not gonna have time for yourself which i need as you can understand in the previous discussion we had, you realize that I need a lot of time for myself. And I believe that time for myself has positive consequences on my family. I'm a better family member. And the family supports me and support my business

and the business support my family. So I kind of have that balance that I really don't want to change. I'm content and I don't want to lose that. And it's not about being attached to that. It's not an, it's not an unhealthy attachment. It's just that it's very beneficial for myself first, of course, but for everyone around me. And it's why, it's why, um, I am where I am and I'm doing what i'm doing i mean you you sound

content and not that i have a perfect radar for that but i mean some mornings i'm a bit more grumpy before the coffee but and i have challenges during the day i mean it's not like uh my days are blissful all every day of the week i have some challenges that I have to resolve and I have some moments of stress and so on. I mean, it's not like, you know, Nirvana here.

It's, it's, I mean, it's New York. That is a great quote. Uh, uh, I,

I want to, if you'd be comfortable, because I think it would be very encouraging for a lot of people listening. If you're willing to look back at your childhood, it seems like certainly at points it was very difficult for you. Could you tell us about some of those early days? Maybe just describe for us some of what your childhood was like and some of the most sort of important events in your childhood. So I was born in a family that was pretty successful. My mother was in the fashion industry. She was still a beautiful woman. My father was in banking. Perfect young couple. A success story.

They were living in the French Riviera. They were actually living, when I was four or five years old, in Saint-Tropez. So it was, you know, with the jet set and so on. And then they divorced, and my life changed with the divorce. Until then, I was, when they divorced, I was about six years old, or five, six years old. Until then, I had a great life. Everything was fine. And then when they divorced, my mother remarried, my

father remarried. His wife didn't necessarily like my presence. My stepfather was very, very very mean to me at least is the way I felt and it was hell at home for me as a young kid I was sent when I was 8 years old to boarding school where it became hellish

when a priest tried to sexually abuse me. Many challenges like that in my life. Then I came back home, of course, and I had to deal with my stepfather for a long time. It was a very challenging um relationship that we had he was uh verbally abusive and physically will have no problem to beat me and and so on in in of course making sure that my mother wouldn't know my mother was struggling to um to raise me and uh at 15 being a very bad student and having a lot of anger issues and a lot of other issues linked to that lifestyle i was at 15 years old in the principal office at the end of the year nine grade discussing my future and my future was he cannot go to a regular school is Eric has to find a job

and I was actually very happy about that because I didn't like the the school system and I asked if I could go to culinary school and learn the craftsmanship of becoming a chef. It was not easy. Culinary schools are very difficult and they require a lot of discipline and it's tough for young kids like when they are 15 years old, 16 years old, 17. At 17, actually, I moved to Paris and I lived in a tiny, tiny, tiny apartment and worked in La Tour d'Argent, which was very famous at the time and struggled with ridiculous salaries and the challenges of the kitchen and so on. And those years were not happy years for myself.

Moving on, I mean, I worked for Joël Robuchon in his kitchen. They were tough kitchens, a lot of work, not too many rewards that you will see at the end of the day. And when I was, I think, well, I did my military duties because they were mandatory, and it's not really a pleasant experience. It's not meant to be a pleasant experience. Then I moved to the U.S. in 1989 without speaking a word of English.

So huge challenges coming to America and discovering that nobody's waiting for you at the airport with a red carpet and say, oh, my God, you're French, you know, to cook, you're a genius. So all those. Especially in New York City. Yeah. So all those aspects were very, very challenging and didn't make me a happy camper. And I was I was missing something in my life. I was missing spirituality and what Buddhism came for me today.

But yes, I was a little bit lost and angry. And angry means unhappy. That was really the beginning of my life. Of course, I had some good moments and some good friends and good relationships and so on. But when I look at the big picture, they were the dark years when did you during that entire period uh was there a particular moment or day or dish or anything where you realized huh i think i could actually be really good at this meaning cooking was there any assignment a teacher anything that gave you the confidence? It's interesting because I started in 1991 at Le Bernardin as the chef.

And in 94, I was the executive chef of Le Bernardin and a business partner of Maggie Le Cause who created it with her brother, Le Bernardin. 1991. 1994 the brother passed away and i i was uh in charge of the kitchen uh by myself i mean by myself with the team of course to manage the team and in in 95 ruth rachel at the new york time gave um gave the team and and to myself ultimately a four-star review. And from there, we had only accolades and rewards and so on. But I never thought I was a good cook, neither a good chef. And it took me until the year 2000, when I did a book called A Return to Cooking, that I realized that I was insulting my luck because I was talented and not everybody's talented.

And I had to acknowledge it without being pretentious, not to insult my luck. It was a discovery for me. So A Return to Cooking was an adventure. I wanted to study the four seasons, a little bit like Vivaldi with the music, but myself with the food. And I decided to bring a painter,

two photographers and a writer and to go to different regions of America during different seasons. And therefore we rented houses in Vermont for the fall, in Hamptons for the summer, in the spring in California. And because the winter was too challenging in North America, we decided to go to Puerto Rico. And during that experience, that was starting every morning with, for the painter, a black canvas,

and for myself going to the market and finding ingredients and cooking for the group and documenting the recipes and so on, it's when I realized that I was a good cook. 2000, in 2000. 2000, it's amazing. It took me such a good cook. 2000. In 2000. 2000. It's amazing. It took me such a long time. And then after that, I have been making sure

that it doesn't go to my head and that I stay humble and that I share the knowledge and the cooking wisdom accumulated. And yeah, it's what it is. But ultimately, since that process i accept the gift that i received uh in my life which is being able to be a good cook and to be a chef ultimately you have you have also your memoir which is 32 yolks Yolks. Yes. Subtitle, From My Mother's Table to Working the Lion. And I wanted to ask you, because it seems like you have a very special relationship with your mother.

If you're cooking dinner for your mother, are there any particular meals that you like to make for her or that she likes you to make for her? I think she likes to cook for me. Ah, that's, that's, I, that I should have seen that coming. Yes. No, that's, that makes sense. It's very interesting because when I was a kid, uh, and she knew I was unhappy and I was challenged challenge her way to make me happy and to to show her love to her son was through the process of feeding me through the process of love for our child. And if today I am with my mother, I am sure that she will not let me take the knife and start to slice vegetables or anything. She will take total control of the kitchen, claiming that I would mess up the kitchen and she would have to clean it after.

So that would be her excuse. But I think the real reason would be to make her son feeling the love from his mom. I have many dishes that I love from her. She was doing, and she still does, a Vietnamese spring roll called Nem, which I loved. And actually, I have never been able to make it as good as hers.

And she will make also for me, steak au poivre with green peppercorn sauce. That was for me like the ultimate. And then every day she would make an apple tart. That was like, what, 12 inches apple tart that I would eat every afternoon when I was coming back from school. And that was my favorite meal. Oh, man, I'm so hungry. I've been fasting.

I'm so hungry. I'm like salivating like my dog when I'm opening a can of food. Is it true, this is just I guess in the questions related to food category, is it true that you eat Swiss cheese before you taste dishes? Yes. Okay, can you explain this, please? Yes, of course. Not only I eat Swiss cheese, I make the entire team of sous-chefs, and there are eight sous-chefs in Le Bernardin, I make them eat Swiss cheese that is not artisanal,

it's an industrial cheese, because it always has the same flavor. It's very consistent. It's not the best Swiss cheese. It doesn't have the qualities of an artisanal cheese, but we know that it tastes a certain way. And then when we come to the kitchen, we calibrate our palate by testing it. So when I say calibrate our palate, what I mean is that if I test the cheese today and it tastes too salty, I know my palate is very sensitive to salt. If the cheese tastes very bland my palate is numb if the cheese tastes very well balanced

i know my palate is very accurate and we we do that with all the sous chefs we are going to go to all the mise en place which is the preparation from different stations and when we go test the sauce and any preparation if we find everything salty we know it's because our palate is off because of the cheese gave us the information that we we are ultra sensitive to salt or if everything seems to be bland uh i know my palate is is numb and that can come from many things i mean if you drink a bit too much at night your palate will be numb uh if you um if you uh have a good diet and don't eat too many sweets at night, depending on your lifestyle and what you eat, your palate will react the day after.

And the cheese is the way for us to know that. I love that. All right. So since that one mind some some gold i'm going to keep going with some food related questions uh if if you could ask home cooks just assume most people are listening or of course home cooks one ingredient they should use less and one ingredient you wish they would experiment with more? I am in favor of organic. And we're going to take two examples, right? We're going to take animals and we're going to take vegetables. So if you have the choice of feeding your family an animal like a chicken, for instance, or eggs, or even milk that doesn't have

growing hormones, doesn't have pesticides, doesn't have antibiotics, and so on, if you have that choice, would you give your child a meat or eggs or milk with those chemicals in it or would you give your child and if you can afford it obviously because very often is a matter of budget but would you give your child a product that is purely natural and doesn't have those chemicals for the vegetables is very much the same i'm not anti-gmo vegetables necessarily but when gmo carried the um carried the it's not the genes but the dna of roundup for instance and when the vegetables have a lot of pesticides and and on. And when you have choice and you can give to your family vegetables or fruits who don't have that, what would you give to your family? So I think my answer is not exactly what you expect,

because you would like to maybe one single ingredient. But I'm a bit broader in my vision, and I think it's still important to not necessarily answer what you want. Oh, sure. I don't know. You have full creative liberty here. But if we go to an ingredient, I would say if you have choice in between real butter and fake butter, right, that is made of chemicals and so on, processed foods basically, it's processed food. If you have the choice, use the regular

butter, for instance, which as we know, it has fat, it has benefits, and it has ingredients in its body that are not necessarily positive for the human body, but do not use processed food. Our body doesn't digest processed food easily,

or doesn't digest it at all. So I'm saying use natural products. Good recommendation. Yeah, the budget, I really wish that there were more of a level playing field. I'm optimistic about Amazon having bought Whole Foods. I'm very, very interested to see how that may open the door to, since one of the first announcements they made was going to be lowering prices since in effect amazon's creating an internal customer for developing their own infrastructure potentially to then supply food on a much broader scale so they can afford to have lower prices i'm very very excited to see how that impacts yeah me too the options

that people have uh do you have a favorite cocktail? Dirty Martini. Dirty Martini. With vodka. Stir. Top. That was easy. Well, Eric, this is really fun. We could talk for hours and hours and hours.

I want to be respectful of your time. And hopefully we'll get to meet in person at some point. Certainly, I'm in New York often enough that I would really enjoy that. Come visit us, of course. It would be a pleasure. Is there anything, before we wrap up, that you would like people listening to consider or try or ask themselves or do? Do you have any ask of the audience? Not really.

I mean, I hope that our conversation today will make everyone think a little bit about his lifestyle and about his definition of happiness and about his impact in the world. And if we have done that, which is very ambitious, I'm very happy. And if we haven't done it, it's quite fine. But I hope that our conversation is, first of all, inspirational for ourselves and for others. I think so. I think that if people listening enjoyed this half as much as I did, then I think we're gold. And people can certainly find you online to say hello or thank you or to ask a question on instagram twitter at eric repair

uh that's e-r-i-c-r-i-p-e-r-t and i apologize for my terrible terrible french pronunciation but i'm going to say it like a yankee and and then facebook chef eric repair and the website this is where my pronunciation is going to kill me, Le Bernadin, which is the L-E hyphen B-E-R-N-A-R-D-I-N dot com. And Eric, it's been such a pleasure. I really appreciate you taking the time. I had a lot of fun. Great pleasure. And I'm honored to be talking to you and your audience. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity

and hopefully I'll see you in New York very soon. Oh yes, now that's a deal. And to everybody listening, we mentioned a lot of books, we mentioned a lot of different resources, different types of meditation and so on. You'll be able to find links to everything we've talked about

in the show notes, as always, at Tim.blog forward slash podcast for this episode and every other episode. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the

esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, founded by the genius Finns who lit the internet on fire. And you may have heard of their mushroom coffee, which features chaga and lion's mane,

which is taken in Silicon Valley by storm. I use it pretty much every day, either that or the chaga, which is decaf, a separate version. And I use both of these primarily for focus and productivity. They just get you going, light you up like a Christmas tree. So you should definitely check it out. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement. And for right now, this is the answer. I try to force this on all of my house guests. It is a hell of a thing. If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with me, I always try to feed it to them because I'm going to get the limitless effect

and get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product and Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their product sold out in less than a week. So you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water. And oddly enough, only includes 40 milligrams of caffeine. So it has less than half of what you'd get in a regular cup of coffee. I don't get any jitters, acid reflux, or any stomach

burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool. So if you don't like caffeine, they also offer very strong, but caffeine free mushroom elixirs, which I will sometimes have in the evening. I find Chaga specifically to be very, very grounding and earthy. So that is another option. And I have a cupboard full of their products at the moment, which is right around the corner of my kitchen. You can try something, you can try sample pack, which is great also Right now by going to foursigmatic.com forward slash Tim. That's foursigmatic, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com forward slash Tim. And use the code Tim, T-I-M, to get 20% off of your first order. And they're not that expensive

anyway. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. So try them out. getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases if I can't get what I need through whole food meals throughout the rest of the day. As listeners of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can receive 30% off of your first order by visiting athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim. That is a great deal on one of my favorite products, and it covers my bases each day. It is part of my routine and it leaves me with less to worry about. If for instance, I have to skip a meal or just can't get a high quality meal. So check it out, go to athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim and learn all about it.