The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 40: Andrew Zimmern on Simple Cooking Tricks, Developing TV, and Addiction

Episode Date: October 28, 2014

Andrew Zimmern is a world-class chef, television host and producer, writer, and -- at the end of the day -- teacher. You've probably seen his shows Bizarre Foods and Dining with Death. In 2010 and 2013 he was awarded the James Beard Foundation Award, which annually presents awards for excellence in cuisine, culinary writing, and culinary television. But many people don't know the earlier chapters in his life. At one point, he was sleeping on the streets, stealing purses, and shooting heroin. In our interview, he shares all. We delve into everything, including his culinary tricks, how he developed his hit TV show, his influences, key turning points in his life, beating addiction, and much more. This is a powerful interview. It's full of tactics for anyone, and it has extra insights for all types of compulsive behavior (and, really, who doesn't have at least one?). I hope you enjoy it. Show notes can be found at http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast***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.

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Oh, Jesus, I didn't see you there. Hi, everybody. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I have the holiday spirit in me, and it's not even anywhere close. But you know what? It's never too early for Christmas music. And for all those people out there who disagree, jolly up. Really, get along with it. In any case, I have a really fun episode for you guys, or at least I had a blast doing it, and I hope you do as well. But first, I do get asked about tea. And I said asked as if it's A-S-S-E-D, which I haven't really said before. Might be getting late. Maybe I need some more caffeine. But yes, I was asked about my tea preferences. And one of my favorites,

which is a little tougher to get, but it's fun to look for, is from Taiwan, or at least it's mailed from Taiwan. And that is from Living Tea, which is a really interesting organization. You can check them out at livingtea.net. And it is a 1960s Hui An Sheng Puerh, and that is spelled H-U-I space A-N space S-H-E-N-G space puerh, P-U-E-R-H. Sheng, by the way, means uncooked or raw or fresh. It is the same character that is the nama of namabiru in Japanese. And it is also the se of sensei. So if you have sensei, like teacher in Japanese, it literally means born before. So before born is the se of sheng. Okay. And coincidentally, there are words in Japanese that use the same characters that you find in Chinese, but they mean very different things.

So sensei is shensheng or mister, like Mr. Cheng in Chinese. Pretty funny stuff. The perhaps most amusing example is tegami. Tegami in Japanese is letter. You write someone a letter, a love letter. That is tegami. But that is shouzhi in Mandarin Chinese, and that is toilet paper. Too bad. Lost in translation, what are you going to do? When you don't have a writing system and you need to borrow slash steal someone else's, well, sometimes those things happen. Anyway, I digress. The guest for this episode is none other than, you guessed it, Andrew Zimmern. Andrew Zimmern is a fantastic fellow. He's also a world-class chef, television host and producer, food writer, and, at the end of the day,

incredible teacher. You've probably seen his show Bizarre Foods or Dining with Death. In 2010 and 2013, he was awarded the James Beard Foundation Award, which in the culinary cuisine world is the equivalent of winning the Best Actor Oscar twice in four years. He's an impressive dude. What a lot of people don't know is that in the earlier chapters of his life, he was at the lowest of the low. At one point, he was sleeping on the streets, stealing purses and shooting heroin. And in our conversation, he shares all of this. We delve into every nook and cranny of his background and his ascension to success, including his culinary tricks, how he developed his hit TV show, his influences, key turning points in his life, and much more. This was a very fun interview to do. Andrew is a pro. He's

really good at this type of interview or conversation. He's an enthusiastic guy, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. So without further ado, please meet Andrew Zimmer. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm very excited to have Andrew Zimmern with us. Andrew, it's so nice to have you on the phone. Thank you very much, Tim. Good to talk to you.

Yeah, it's been, I think, a long time coming for me. I remember being interviewed on your podcast, what seems like ages ago. And maybe that's because you sort of acted as my ad hoc therapist while I was experimenting on television. I don't think with you anyone acts as your ad hoc anything. I mean, there's a beautiful, unintentional, intentional rhythm to the things that you do. And I just, you know, I mean, over the last couple of years, we've become friends and it's what people do for each other. I like to think I always remain teachable. And at the core of your stuff, that's sort of what I

take from it in its broadest possible sense. And so I think it's doubly charming that you actually practice what you preach. Well, I appreciate it. And I have to say, I don't think I would have made it through even the preparatory stages with television, let alone the grueling filming schedule and editing schedule had it not been for our sessions. So thank you very much for that. I don't know how you do what you do. And that's part of what I want to explore today. But you are the hardest working man in show business, as they might say. I am just astonished by how many projects you have going on, whether that's sort of sequentially or in parallel. And maybe we could start with just a couple of rapid-fire questions, and then I want to dig into some of your background.

Sure. And let's not assume that the way I'm doing it is actually successful. I mean, you know, the therapy session can work both ways. I mean, you know, it's a – I oftentimes wake up in the middle of the night and wondering, you know, wonder to myself if the number of balls that I'm juggling is actually in inverse proportion to my ability to make some of those balls bigger. Yeah, I know. Visualize that. No, no. I was thinking of that and then the plate spinning.

And I think both of them are very appropriate, but you've had some huge successes. And of course, there's a lot behind the scenes that people don't see. But I guess just to start off, and these are in no particular order, but when you were starting to conceive of Bizarre Foods, what shows did you look to as inspiration or from which you wanted to pull elements? What were the models that you had in mind, if any? Or what were you looking to draw from? Oh, no, no, no. I definitely did.

You know, I grew up watching Great Chefs of Europe on PBS, the first Great Chefs series. And I loved the intensity of that and the attention to detail and the focus on the food. I morphed a little bit into, at one point in my TV watching, as I was sort of looking at things that I wanted to pay attention to, sort of the smartness of what Michael Palin was doing. You know, I saw, you know, I'm from New York. So when someone says, what do you like? I answer that by saying, well, I'll tell you what I don't like.

And what I didn't like was, you know, the sort of old school, late 80s, Rick Steves, Celtic canned music, watching him walk across the cliffs of Dover, getting bigger and bigger and bigger in the frame, and then breathing and sighing and looking out over the ocean and then saying something to the effect of, you know, a lovely day's walk. And now on to the village. It just seems to me that I wanted the smartness of Michael Palin. I wanted the attention to detail of some of those early food shows like Great Chefs. And I wanted to make sure that whatever I was doing was within my unique ability to deliver.

I always thought that, you know, I mean, obviously Rick Steves is an expert on travel and has been everywhere and a legend in the business and pioneered, and without folks like him, folks like me don't have a job. There's probably not even a travel channel, actually. But at the end of the day, I thought that anybody could have stood there and said what he said. You know, you could have paid an actor to deliver those lines, and nobody would have been the wiser. I wanted to do things that were more docu, what we now call docu-follow.

And I put all those sort of things together. I also had, you know, there was a bit of a Trojan horse involved in my show pitching. I wanted to make a show that allowed me a platform to talk about patience, tolerance, and understanding in the world. I wanted to change the tone of our national conversation away from the things that we don't have in common towards the things that we do have in common. I wanted to make a show that railed against the vile human frailty of contempt prior to investigation.

And so if you go and you pitch that and then sort of launch into this sort of travel food idea, everyone shows you the door. So I basically tried to sell a food culture show with a hook, Stories from the Fringe. They ended up being called Bizarre. The original title for it was called Chew on This. But Eric Schlosser, one of his books, one of the children's versions of one of his books was called that. And I very much, you know, snuck a show in the door knowing that if it was successful, I'd get leverage. I'd be able to sort of morph the show into the into what it sort of is today.

It's taken me, you know, 200 shows and eight seasons, nine seasons. But I think the last couple of years, we really have done a fantastic job of representing cultural storytelling through food in the right way. And I'm looking at some notes that I took down after one of our first therapy sessions in my direction, and I found a lot of it so helpful. And one of the recommendations was, and I'm paraphrasing, of course, but the most important thing is to be you, not your interactor. And being yourself and keeping it within your area of expertise. And the line that really stuck with me was, you know, how episode one is, is how you're going to have to be.

Episode one, moment one. Yeah. So you really have to think about it. I mean, you can never take that back. Yeah, so you really have to think about it. your brand and made your cable. And it's a whole different skill set, a whole different set of muscles, you know. And you and I talked many times, you know, sometimes late at night from continents, you know, far, far away about, you know, how to approach this kind of work and how to make it successful. And I think I told you the story of the first episode one show.

It actually was the pilot. I went to the Asadachi, which is a restaurant in Tokyo. The translation for the restaurant name means morning erection. And it's true. And it's a get a mono bar, the kind of place where businessmen close deals and drink a lot. They're tiny little izakayas where the food is very, very strange and it's meant to, you know, if you eat snake bile, I'll eat snake bile and then

the deal will be, you know, done sort of thing. And it's a place where guys get drunk and eat crazy food and then, you know, go off whoring for the rest of the day and sign, you know, have their number twos sign the contract. So we go to this place, and the very first thing that they had me do was do a stand-up

outside the building and then walk in the door. And there was a part of me that had all the funniest lines about making fun of their name. And what is a stand-up just for people who might not, what do you mean by stand-up? Well, you know, the little walk and talk. I'm outside, the camera catches me walking down the street. This is very 1999

TV. Your camera's walking down the street, the talent stops, looks towards the camera, delivers a couple of lines to set up what the audience is going to see, and then walks in the door and the camera stays on the door. The door swings shut behind them and the camera tilts up and catches the name of the establishment. Got it.

Right? Yep. We no longer make our show that way, but that's the way everyone did it. at, you know, 1991, 2000, 1999, 2000, when we were contemplating the pilot and then ended up shooting it right before, I guess, September 11th was the first pilot. Sorry to interrupt. So you're thinking of all these lines to deliver related to the name.

Yeah, you know, you can make fun of these people, and it's such an easy, it's the easy go-to. I mean, you see people do it all the time on TV, and a little voice inside my head said, don't do it. Because if you do that, you're going to have to come up with those lines all the time. You're going to be someone that you're not. All you want to do your whole life was to, and quite frankly, the person that I am is very respectful of other cultures. Don't do it. Don't give in to the fast, easy, cheap cheap temptation which we always do i mean it's the

easiest way and it was yeah and you know i went uh i all i did was i i sort of walked up and turned and said you know the you know some benign line and walked in the door the moral of the story being i i didn't have to make fun of the people make make fun of their food, make fun of the name. And it's turned out to be the best decision I ever made because not only does the show stand and my brand sort of stand for, you know, people always talk about the respect that I paid other people within the show, which pleases me. And I think it's an important thing for all of us when we're travelers. But it's so much less work just to be yourself. You don't have to change that.

There's lots of people who have hosted shows on Travel Channel, Food Network, et cetera, who are not experts in their field. They do a soul food cooking show, but if you ask them, you know, what Johnny Cakes are, they couldn't tell you. Because, you know, unless they did a script and the researchers, you know, had filled them in the day before. It's a very, very strange world on television. Some people are just presenters.

You, on the other hand, myself, Tony, there's a handful of people out there, Alton Brown, are folks who have been doing their content for years before the TV camera came on, and we just get to be ourselves. No, it's one of the aspects of your work that I've always appreciated is how genuinely

interested you seem because you are genuinely interested. Yeah, that's me. Just as a side note, I have a buddy who runs a bunch of restaurants and does a lot of a few of his companies do a lot of catering and at one point they had one of the most famous Italian chef personalities on TV hosting an event

and they called this chef's assistant and asked for her meatball recipe. And they said, what meatball recipe? And it just was such an eye-opening, sort of jaw-dropping experience with this guy. So, yes, certainly what you see is not always what you get. On the cooking side of things, just to throw in some randomness to this, if you had to choose this, and I was going to say for the rest of your life, but for the next, say, year, three herbs or spices to cook with, to experiment with? And you can modify the question. What would you choose? I can't exist without hot chilies, shallots, and citrus lemon. Citrus lemon. Citrus lemon. It's, you know, before I get to, you know, the world of herbs and spices is great. But before that, there's some other building blocks that I would prefer to have in my kitchen or my desert island, you know.

I'm going to assume on my island that you've, you know, stranded me on, I have access to, you know, I can walk out into the ocean and grab seaweed or fish or, you know, throw rocks at birds and, you know, get something over a fire. Um, and you know, so if I had to have the first three things that I would want to have with me are hot chilies, uh, shallots or some kind of onion. I happen to prefer shallots of all the alliums and citrus, and I generically choose lemon above the others. With those things, I can do everything. Sure, I could pick cumin or cilantro or basil or things like that,

but they're a fairly limited use. With lemon chilies and an allium or shallot, I can do anything. And I can do ceaseless variations on them. And I can cure. And the variety of flavor combinations and techniques that I can use with those give me the most variety so I wouldn't be so bored. Maybe I'm overthinking the question, but that's my gut instinct is to go with those. No, you're not overthinking it at all. And I love asking this question because I still consider myself a novice cook, certainly. But in doing research for The 4-Hour Chef, the citrus really blew my mind when I think I either read or had someone say to me,

I use citrus the way a lot of people use salt. And I was like, huh, that's a really interesting way to think about it. Well, salt's an acid, you know, and citrus is an acid. And there's an incredible amount of acid in all the alliums. There's an incredible amount of acid in all of the chilies. And it's no secret as to why those things are food-changing, food-altering, technique-based or technique-inspiring ingredients to use. They're much more versatile in the kitchen than, you know, basil or thyme or something like that. When I talk to young cooks about balancing a dish, it's texture, it's temperature contrast,

and the way you build flavor contrast and create a more symphonic taste experience is by experimenting with acids and fats. So by its very nature, chili, shallots, and, you know, lemon, salt, those are the things, sugar. We use them in different forms, but they're very acidic, and they provide much more flavor when we're cooking than most people give them credit for. Oh, definitely. I just, these are such simple things, but game changers for me as someone who sort of viewed cooking through the lens of a microwave, and that was about it for many, many years. Just the ability to take, say, chilies. A friend of mine gave me some Thai chilies that she was growing in the garden and just sort of sauteing them in cooking oil for a few minutes before using that oil for something else.

It totally changes the dish. It's really so much fun to have. It's so funny you used that example. There's, you know, I was about to talk about lemon juice the same way. Sometimes with, you know, I mean, my wife's roast chicken, she stuffs her cavity with lemon and herbs and garlic. And that lemon roasts and it starts to break down and it boils and it perfumes the inside of that dish. Some of that lemon juice goes down onto the bottom of the pan and caramelizes and gives

a tartness and a wonderful bitterness to the olive oil-based pan sauce that she makes for that dish. And it seasons the roast vegetables that she puts in them. But then when it comes to the table, that lemon flavor, because heat's been applied to it and heat sort of kicks down the impact of the citrus, she then will finish the dish with, we just do it a lot in our family, a little bit of fresh citrus and olive oil. And you then have two or three or four, depending on what bite you take,

different variations on that same ingredient, lemon, in that dish, and it creates a layered experience, which is much more essential. It's a deeper flavor. It's more fully realized. And that's the difference between the kind of, you know, the roast chicken that everyone says, why is Jonathan Waxman's chicken at Barbudo so, you know, freaking awesome? And it's because even though it just looks like roast chicken with a little bit of sea salt and a salsa verde, you know,

drizzled over some of the pieces, there's so much different seasoning at different times in that dish that you are taking in a much broader symphonic taste experience than the looks of the dish would tell you exists. It's profound. I think that's the beauty of food. It's like art. I mean, I remember sitting in Madame Koretsky's Northern European painting class as a freshman at Vassar College, you know, trying to focus on, you know, the first day at school and instead of it, you know, Anne Weiss's backside sitting in the desk in front of

me and the you know she she put a picture up on the wall and the picture was you know some you know 16th century northern european portrait painter uh and and it was a woman standing at a window there was a table in front of her with a bowl of fruit and it was a sunny day outside through the window and she said everyone write down what you see and know about this painting. And everyone wrote down the same 10 things that were in there. There's a dog, she's wearing a blue dress, there's a bowl of fruit on the table. And Madame Koretsky then spent the next 45 minutes detailing what Flemish life was like in the late 16th century based only on what she saw in the painting because, you know, there was a banana and a bowl of fruit and a pineapple, but those don't blemish life was like in the late 16th century based only on what she saw in the painting,

because, you know, there was a banana and a bowl of fruit and a pineapple, but those don't grow in Holland. So she, you know, these people were wealthy, they were traders, there was symbolism, but there were also, you know, she approached it like Sherlock Holmes. And, you know, I learned that day that, you know, because I was also cooking a lot at the time, you know, it reminded me of what a lot of chefs were saying and what my dad would tell me when we were sitting when I was eight years old and a little sleepy, you know, brasserie in Les Halles in Paris, picking big or no with a big, you know, silver metal toothpick, you know, and I began to realize that I could tell stories about life through food. And I, I now describe it as being able to talk and tell about the history of a people and a culture by staring into a bowl of soup. But it really is the same thing.

You can deduce so much about food and in its preparation and in talking it through with people about where concerns are. about lemon, I think, you know, underlines and underscores the fact that, you know, today in America, we fetish, we fetishize food in a way that is greater and deeper, and probably, you know, has a lot of negative impact, as well as positive, but we fetishize it in a way that has never been done before in the history of the world about any sort of cultural meme. I can't think of one. Yeah. No, I agree. And I want to explore that a bit. But before we do, shallots. All right. So shallots, I am a big fan of shallots. I've met quite a few chefs who are also big fans of shallots. Is it possible for a novice chef to use shallots well without having very good knife skills. I think that it is. Okay, I would love for you to elaborate because that's always been for me.

And I consider my knife skills pretty decent, but it's still been challenging for me. How so? Well, it's just... In a recipe that requires them to be minced or sliced thin? Exactly, which most of the recipes that I've come across seem to require that. So I'd love for you to, and I can do it, but it's not my favorite work. It's not my favorite prep work to do. Well, there's two issues at hand.

One is how to use a shallot and what's required of it, despite what a certain recipe will tell you. And the other one is your knife skills in particular. And you're no different than any other person who loves to cook and wants to get better. And if you loved golf and you were playing golf all the time and you told your friends, God, you know, my putting just isn't great. They'd look at you and say, how do you do on the putting green? And you'd say, I don't go to the putting green.

And they'd laugh at you. I always tell people you do on the putting green? And you'd say, I don't go to the putting green. And they'd laugh at you. I always tell people when they're cooking, if you love to cook every day, buy big bags of carrots, onions, and celery, and every day mince them, cut them into batons, brunoise dice them. When you're standing around, listen to the radio for 10 minutes and practice your knife skills. If you do that for two weeks, you will improve the amount of time. And gosh, don't I know how much you love saving time.

That investment in yourself, front side investment in time, lifetime of time saving. My wife always marvels. She says it takes you half the time to make a recipe. And, you know, I've been cooking for a lot longer than she has, but the more she practices knife skills, the faster it becomes for her, because that's the sort of mundane stuff, simmering a pot, watching it, you can do other things, you can multitask. I think at the end of the day, it's assembling your ingredients and your mise en place. So some of that is knife skills. Some of that is how you organize your kitchen.

There's a lot of things that you can do to, you know, speed things up. But practice is something that helps. The second thing is, you know, might be equipment. I'm just going to assume with as many, you know, food geek friends as you have that you have the right knife for yourself. But I use a short chef's knife, usually about eight inches, as my handy sort of go-to knife. And I use a thin-bladed one so that I can use the front of it choking up to cut small things. And I can rock it and chop it using the back three-quarters of it if need be. And I can even choke up and tournay a mushroom if I need to.

But I can do almost everything with that one knife. Then the third issue for this really becomes, you know, the mythology of food and why we believe certain people and they tell us we have to do a certain thing. To a large degree, you do a lot of myth busting and you find out that, you know, in reading all your stuff, there's always something that is perceived to be a truth that it turns out once you investigate it and you talk about it with other experts, it turns out you don't need to

go from A to B to C to D to get to point E. Sometimes you do. Oftentimes you can just go A to B and if you do B really well or do B differently, you don't need C and D at all. You arrive at E. And I don't think there's anything wrong with people using a Ben Rinner or a mandolin, some of those vegetable slicers, where you put the blade on a thin setting and you can shave that shallot into tiny little pieces. There's nothing wrong with using that. Stack up those slices and then rock your knife across it a couple times, and you'll have a micro dice that would rival anything that Masaharu Morimoto can create.

My wife reads recipes, and I'll see her doing something. I say, why are you cutting the shallot that way? Or why are you cutting the carrot that way? She goes, oh, it says so. And I read the recipe. I'm like, well, there's no need. You can just peel them and leave them whole in the oven. If you slice them into little coins, they're just going to disappear in the pan. A lot of times recipes, except from a very small handful of culinarians, are not as exacting as they should be. And when they are exacting, they're giving you unnecessary information that I think creates a lot of unnecessary busy work. Oh, definitely. One thing that blew me away, I really, this just blew my mind, is how poorly most recipes perform when you have a half a dozen people recipe testing them. Oh, gosh, at high altitude,

low humidity in Aspen versus people in Georgia or Florida because I wanted to see how that would affect things. And you would find out that in many cases, somebody would go to a famous restaurant, a writer, and not certainly faulting them for that, take a recipe that is designed for 200 covers, right? So like massive quantities of food and then simply use division to take it down to a serving for two or four people. And man, a lot of it just didn't make any sense at all. And no, it's nice to hear you say that.

And also as a piece of trivia, I'm not sure if the brand talks about it, but so the Benrainer, the bendy means convenient in Japanese. That's why it's called that. And it's a hell of a device, man. You got to watch your fingers, but yeah, it's a... Well, you do, but you also learn to leave the tails on your shallot and hold on to that. And then at the very end, I mean, you're not handling, you know, rock cocaine. I mean, you know, it's a shallot. I mean, that last little quarter inch, just throw it away. It's amazing to me that a lot of people knock Martha Stewart.

They knock magazine recipes, whether it's Rachel Ray's or even Food & Wine, the magazine I write for, the biggest folks in the business usually write the most exacting recipes because their audience is very quick to turn on them if things don't work out. When I look at recipes and suggest them for my wife, and she says, oh, it's a great recipe for pound cake, and we go on the Internet and there's 20 recipes for pound cake, I go with the one that even describes to a quarter of an inch the size of the pan. Because if someone is describing that level of detail, you know that they've gone through it. The person who writes a recipe that says, you know, grease a cake pan,

you know, they haven't made it. It's a tip off right away that something is wrong. Definitely. It reminds me a lot of the David Lee Roth anecdote about the – I think it was the brown M&Ms. He wanted to have all the brown M&Ms removed from the M&Ms that would people managing the tour would read that level of detail in the contract. And that if they didn't catch that, there would be other more substantial things, equipment-related, setup-related, that they would also miss. And therefore, that was the litmus test to see if they would catch that type of detail. And I agree with you. Get a medium-sized saucepan.

What does that mean to a novice? Exactly. So to shift gears just a little bit, you went to a great school, Vassar, traveled, it sounds like, as a child or a young man to Paris. Yeah, my dad was in the international advertising business. So when I was six years old, I started going to Europe three or four times a year, mostly with him, sometimes just for three or four days at a time. And it was and he I'm a paler version of him. He loved to eat and travel and drink and, and told stories in a day where you needed to command a dining room table with great storytelling

if you were kind of that person that took up space the way my dad did. I mean, he was a great taker-upper of space wherever he was. You knew he was there. And I think it paints a picture, it might paint a picture for people who aren't familiar with all of your background, that you had a hockey stick-like career, very few bumps in the road from start to finish, just this straight ascension to the TV star that you are today. But one thing that I noticed, and I'm embarrassed I didn't know this earlier, is it seems like you were homeless for a period of time. And I was hoping that you could comment. Oh, I was a fucking mess. I mean, I, um, you know, I grew up in a very idyllic surrounding. I had every opportunity and every advantage that a kid could have. I grew up in New York in the

sixties. My dad ran a big ad agency. Um, it was a privileged lifestyle. We had more than one home. We had more than one car. I went to a hoity-toity private school. I went to two months of summer camp in Maine. But at the same time, you know, my parents divorced, you know, my dad, when, when he left, uh, um, when he and my mom separated, there was a lot of curiosity as to why, because there wasn't fighting in our house. There wasn't anything unusual. Um, my dad was coming to grips with, you know, his own, you know, sexuality and sexual preferences. And, you know, thank God was true to himself and found love with my stepfather. And they were together as partners for 46 years and married for the last year. And

because the state of Maine, where they moved finally past the Merit to Quality Act. But it was a big struggle, and it was really impactful for a six-year-old in 1967. It was a different world than it was today. And so my mom had an operation in a hospital to get an appendix scar removed in 1974 when the bikini lines went down. And they gave her the wrong anesthesia and surgery. She was in a coma for a year, hospitals for three or four years. She was never the same when she got out of them. And I was raised in an empty house,

you know, by a bunch of handlers who made sure I got to school in the morning. And, you know, I saw my dad on weekends and my stepdad, they were together by that point. And, you know, I was sort of the ultimate latchkey kid and I didn't have a lot of direction and I was really pretty miserable and didn't know it. And I found drugs and alcohol at a very young age, 13. And the moment I got high for the first time, I felt like a raindrop entering the river. I felt like I had just unlocked the mystery to life. For the first time in my limited number of years on the planet, I felt comfortable in my own skin.

And I had a really horrible disease called Moore. And so, you know, by the time I got to college, I was a daily heroin addict. I was, you know, my first week of college, I was hospitalized with alcohol poisoning and arrested for narcotics possession. The school that I was at did an intake on me, paid for a chemical dependency evaluation, and I registered chronic on the Jelanik scale. You know, and the counselor told me the time. He said, you're going to die. Addicts and alcoholics of your variety wind up in jails.

Institutions are dead. And you've already done jail time, which I had. He said, you've already been institutionalized, which at that point I had. And he said, so there's nowhere really else for you to go. And you tell that to an 18-year-old kid, they laugh at you. I laughed at him. And I didn't sober up until I was 31. And things got progressively worse.

You know, alcoholism and drug addiction is a progressive illness. It got worse every single day of my life from that point forward. And I went from a place where, you know, in that meeting I told the guy, you know, no, I don't have a problem, you know, to when I finally had my last intervention that started this sobriety almost 23 years ago, I just told them I didn't care. And that was a horrible spot. And those last three or four years of my using, I was in that I don't care spot. I wanted to die. I lost my apartment. The sheriff of New York evicted me. I was sleeping in an abandoned building on a pile of old clothes that I tossed a bottle of Comet cleanser around every night before I went to bed to keep the rats and

roaches off of me when I passed out. I stole purses on streets. I mean, I was a mess. And, you know, it's really sad. Most people just see the face of addiction as that person. You know, I was living in an abandoned building. I didn't shower for a year. I mean, I was disgusting. I took meals in shelters. I got clothes at the Salvation Army. I mean, I was a garden variety street person in New York, the type that you cross the block to avoid. I wasn't pushing a shopping cart, but I was filthy and stank and was wearing rags. And ultimately, I went into a hotel to try to drink myself to death. It didn't work. I had a moment of clarity for the first time in a 15-year period and called a friend and asked for help.

And two days later, I tried to talk him out of that help, of course, once he gave it. Like any alcoholic, I asked for someone to throw me a life preserver, and then I tossed it back at him because I didn't like the color orange. And I immediately was sent to beautiful Center City, Minnesota, to a treatment center called Hazelden, which is how I wound up in Minnesota. I was wondering. I was a born-and-bred New Yorker, and I had a couple of friends who had come through. Why am I lying to you?

Half of my high school went through Hazelden. We all went right from, you know, Studio 54 together to treatment together. And I I was you know, my friends told me they said, you have nothing to go back home for. You've never been able to make your life really work. I'd been successful in restaurant business in New York, and I'd done a lot in a career because I was talented. I was the guy that could put out 500 plates of poached eggs at brunch in a busy Central Park West restaurant. I could stand there and sling it on the line in a three-star Michelin restaurant in New York. In those days, they didn't have a Michelin guide there, but you get the drift. I worked in those kinds of places with those kinds of chefs. It was that skill set that kept me employed, but ultimately, my alcoholism and drug addiction stuck me in Minnesota.

I kept thinking I'd go back. I'd work for a year and a half for Thomas Keller at Raquel, and I'd worked for Ann Rosenzweig at Arcadia, and great chefs in New York City, many of whom fired me after a day of working because they caught on to my shit. A lot of them didn't. But I wanted to come back to New York and give it another try, and my friend said, don't do it. Stay in Minnesota. Do something different. And so I started here, and I ended up opening up a restaurant that became very successful. I left that.

I got into the media business because I felt there was an opportunity there that if I didn't seize it, the door would kind of shut forever on that kind of opportunity just because I saw the popularity of food and media in that intersection, and I wanted to be a part of it early on. How old were you at that point? Oh, gosh. 23 years I was sober. So it was 15, 14 years ago I stopped. I was in the restaurant business here in Minneapolis the first seven years that I lived here. Then I spent a couple of years consulting and I was at that time I was working for free for a local radio station doing a food show, a local TV station where I was the, you know,

morning chef on one of those wacky local morning shows. But I learned at that time, the best job I ever had, I learned how to, you know, read, write and think critically when it came to doing, you know, television, I learned how to edit, I learned what a cameraman had to do. I learned how to produce a segment. I learned how to behave on camera and not be self-conscious. It was the best training I ever had for the job that I do now. And I worked at a magazine doing restaurant writing and essay writing about food. And, you know, I did five or six little blurbs and columns as part of a three person, uh, dining section, uh, staff for our local, you know, glossy monthly here in Minneapolis, St. Paul magazine. And I, I, I had a great editor taught me how to write, uh, again,

and it was, I mean, I was the luckiest guy in the whole world. If you, I mean, it's an incredible story and it gives me a lot to think on. One of the questions that immediately jumped to mind for me was, if you had the opportunity to interact with someone who was exactly where you were at age 18 or 20. Is there a way to persuade that person to avoid that descent into despair and destitution? You know the answer to that question is no. Yeah, that's what I'm asking. I have that opportunity all the time. I mean, I'm very active in a 12-step group, and I believe in carrying forward the message that was carried to me that there is another way of living, that there is a solution to the problem that alcoholics and addicts have. The bigger issue with, you know, the question that you pose is that alcoholism and drug addiction has a major component. In fact, the defining component of those diseases, and it is a disease, despite what Gene Simmons says, it is a disease, and one of its defining characteristics is that it sends your brain a message that tells you you do not have a disease.

If someone tells you you have cancer and there's a chance you're going to die from it unless you do something, not only do people jump to help you, but you jump to help yourself. Yes, there's a handful. You know, I have had friends, parents who have gotten, you know, bad news at the end of their life and said, you know something, I'm not going to pursue wellness. I've had two hip replacements. I'm done. I'm 90 years old.

You know, let's pursue a different way. But for the most part, people seek help. You know, with alcoholism and drug addiction, the first time anybody tells you, hey, dude, you've got a problem, you know, you can't stop. It's a compulsion. It's an allergy. It is defined by its strange mental blank spots that tell you you don't have a problem. That's the tough thing. I wish all it took was a good conversation and that nodding realization but I can't tell you how many people sat at the end of my bed metaphorically speaking told me what my problem was told me there was a solution you know be abstinent go to meetings talk to other

people get help do every do the opposite of the things your brain is telling you you know every version of that conversation I nodded my head every time and said, absolutely, I'm going to do that. And then I, you know, I could do it for a day, two days, three days, and then I'd be right back out there. Sometimes be right back out there. Five minutes later, I got arrested once and the judge was giving me a big lecture and I looked up at the judge and I said, F you, your honor.

And I started screaming at him. And the reason that I was, was I didn't want to hear what he was saying. But the real reason that I was doing it was I knew that he was going to slam his gavel and throw me back inside to the county jail, which was on the other side of that courthouse door. And inside that county jail were people with dope and booze and all the things that I wanted to get away from me and to quiet that voice in my head and, you know, to, to not be feeling what I was feeling. And that is sad and tawdry, but it's, which is the horror of the disease. Life, however, has a way of humbling you. And for me, at a certain point, it wasn't, you know, my parents thought I was dead. I'd lost every job. I was physically ill

and disgusting. I mean, you list all the things. I couldn't hold a job. I couldn't do anything, couldn't function. I was dying, and I wanted to die. And at the end of the day, for the first time ever in my life, I put the cork in the bottle because the last people that in my heart I loved and wanted to respect me walked out the door. At the end of the day, it was their tough love and realizing that I had no more relationships and that I had

really lost everything that got me to maybe take someone's advice. And I did it for like 10 minutes. That's all it took. But the very next person that I spoke to posed a question to me that said, you know, they essentially said, you know, you, you, you don't know the answer to everything in the world. You could walk out that door and get hit by a bus, or you could buy the winning lottery ticket. You don't know, you don't know what life has to offer. And for some reason that made sense to me at that point and got me one more day and then one more day and one more day. And now I've been sober 23 years. Well, this is something I'd love to explore more.

I know you have some time constraints today, but we'll have to do a part two at some point. I hope at the very least, and I'll ask maybe one or two very fast closing questions, but that people listening to this realize that there might be light at the end of the tunnel.

And I've had some very, I've talked about some of my dark moments before, but I've had some extended periods of pretty terrifying darkness and thoughts not very different from those that you've had. And it's easy to believe that that's all there's going to be indefinitely. So hopefully, here's the here's the here's the truth of the matter is, is that I paint

a horrible and disturbing picture of it where there is no help. Nothing can convince the alcoholic or the drug addict that there is another way, except that millions of people have gotten sober and solved that problem. No one is terminally unique. And so while all the things I said are true, it's also true that there is a solution. And part of that begins with picking up the phone and taking advice from someone else.

I mean, to bring it around, you know, and I'm not trying to minimize the impact of these things. Remaining teachable, as I said at the top of our conversation, to me is one of the great things to achieve in life. So when you picked up that phone and very humbly said, I'm now, as someone who, by the way, is brilliant, and everyone puts on a pedestal as being one of the great noble thinkers of our time, and people who intersect with your books and your other materials have a profound respect for you, and rightfully so,

but you're still humble enough to pick up the phone and call at the time an acquaintance and say, I'm having a problem with this thing, and I think you've done this before. What advice would you give me? And that's how we started our friendship. For people out there who are struggling or have a family member that's struggling, there is a solution. On our website at andrewzimmer.com, we have some links to different treatment centers, to AA's general service number. You can call a local hospital. You can stop a policeman in the street, you know, and say, help me. It is a, it is a world that's built out there for us to

get out of ourselves and raise the white flag. And that's the very, the very, very first step is really kind of giving up and saying, I have a problem. I need to, I need to talk to someone about it. It doesn't mean you got to get sober that day either, but you do have to start to think about the problem you have and about who to talk to about it. Andrew, you are a mensch. I appreciate the kind words, obviously. I think it's extremely important advice, and I'm glad that we opened up the story. I had no idea. I know you have to run. I always appreciate your time. No problem. You should email Jen and let's

try to do a part two in the short future so you can air them back to back or do something with it. Whatever you want to do. I would love to do that. For those people listening to this interview, part one, where should they find more about you? Where can they learn more about you?

Everything is on andrewzimmern.com. Perfect. It's a really fun website, too. Lots of great recipes, lots of great information, great interviews with people. You can scroll back and listen to us having a conversation about you. Back in the day. All the in the day all the good things well Andrew I

really enjoyed this and I think a lot of people will benefit from it so until next time thank you very very much I really appreciate it take it easy brother alright man thank you bye bye