Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 526 - Anthony Bourdain: Hungry for Everything

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Anthony Bourdain went from a heroin-addicted line cook bouncing between chaotic New York kitchens to a bestselling author and beloved world traveler who changed the way millions of people thought about food, culture, and the people who connect the two. Today, we explore the wild, restless life of a man who seemed hungry for everything—adventure, knowledge, danger, love, connection, and whatever might be waiting around the next corner—and the complicated final years that ended with his shocking death.Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast.Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On June 8, 2018, the world woke up to some shocking news. Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef, media personality, beloved writer of Kitchen Confidential amongst many other books, a man who had for so long seemed so very intensely alive and in love with life, had died at the age of 61 while filming his CNN show Parts Unknown in France. And the most shocking part was that he hadn't died from a heart attack or from some other ailment brought on by ears of doing hard drugs, smoking like a chimney, drinking heavily, or of an overdose on the drugs he had claimed to have put behind him back in the 90s, but instead, by suicide.

He had hanged himself. Just as it had four years before, when news of the death by hanging of another beloved icon, Robin Williams broke, the cultural conversation soon turned to the obvious question. Why? While for Robin Williams, the idea of a beloved comedy icon suffering from depression unseen,

which was actually a myth took hold, untangling Anthony Bourdain's inner mysteries was a much harder task, despite the fact that seemingly much more information was available about Bordane's personal life. Indeed, Bordane had made his personal life his bread and butter. After spending two uninspiring years getting into all kinds of trouble at Vassar University,

a chance job as a dishwasher. At a restaurant in Cape Cod's Provincetown had set Anthony Bordane on a path that was quite far from the ones his parents in suburban New Jersey had imagined for him. Rather than getting some socially upstanding office job or becoming a professor or some other member of the intellectual upper crust,

Tony, as he was known by friends and family, took a very different path. He had always been attracted to extremes. In the kitchen, with its simultaneous dysfunction and extreme precision, its massive egos, and people who knew how to put those egos aside to serve some good fucking food was exactly the kind of extreme place he fell in love with.

After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978, Tony would go on to work at some of New York's flashiest and most chaotic restaurants, getting an up-close and personal view to the kinds of things most people never see. The intensity of dozens of orders of all coming in at once, the overlooked and often majority immigrant staff that kept the whole place running and the atmosphere of constant partying and also continual hard-ass work that is both hell and heaven for many chefs, minds, bodies, and souls. The kind of thing you might see on an episode of The Bear. Tony fucking loved it. He loved the drugs so often found around professional kitchens, the late nights, the partying, but most of all, the stories. And soon, he had accumulated so many of his own stories, and he wanted to tell those stories,

but it would be a long, hard road to get in there. In the 90s and 2000s, seemingly nobody wanted to hear from just another line cook. If they were going to read something by a chef, it'd better be something written by a celebrity chef, some with a bunch of awards to their name. someone who was a brand. Anthony Bourdain said, fuck that.

He despised brands. He despised celebrity. He despised all the boring, middle of the road, predictable, milk toast, pedestrian shit that goes into marketing most things, including people, including cooks. His book, Kitchen Confidential,

Adventures, and the Culinary Underbelly about his life in restaurants, about real restaurant life, would go on to sell two million copies worldwide since its publication in 2000. But Tony wasn't satisfied with just checking off

that box. He was a man said to rarely ever look back on his accomplishments and to forever be looking ahead towards the next challenge, the next adventure. Over the next two decades, he would become a major force in the world of food, journalism, and media, launching multiple shows where he traveled the world, sampling food most Americans had never heard of, showing the day-to-day lives and rituals of people in faraway countries, and digging into how global events like wars and natural disasters were felt and processed in the communities they hit. And then, in the middle of filming the seventh season of his show on CNN, parts unknown, out of nowhere, he did the unthinkable. He hanged himself. Some would speculate that he had relapsed,

gone back to the heroin or coke that had defied much of his 20s and 30s. Others would speculate that he had been secretly battling depression. Still, others would say that it was his seemingly toxic relationship with an Italian actress, Asi Argento, that had led to his death, although many of those same people would also recognize a darkness in him that had been present from long before his fame, from the beginning, an appetite for chaos and destruction. The life and death of Anthony Bourdain, someone who redefined how many of us think about the intersection of food, travel, and culture right now on another biographical special meat sack who did some special shit edition of TimeSuck.

This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to TimeSuck. You're listening. to time suck. Well, happy Monday and welcome or welcome back to the cold to the curious. I'm Dan Cummins, Suckmaster, a humble servant of Nimrod. Someone also a lot more worried about many of our moralist leaders today than I have ever been worried at any point about Satanus. Someone amused at how many of you thought for a long time last week that I was talking

about that Larry King, the TV interviewer, and you are listening to Time Suck. Hail Nimrod, Hail Lucifina, praise me to Good Boy Bojangles, and Glory B to Triple M. No announcements today. Just dropped off my daughter Monroe at college, so I am an empty nester now, and so far, I fucking hate it. I know I feel better in time, but for right now, pretty much just sad. I miss those fuckers. So I am just as eager as you to get lost in somebody else's story. Need a little escape to take my mind off being bummed out, frankly.

So let's escape together and learn about someone who led a complicated life, a life that ended so tragically, but a life that was all. also in so many ways leading up to that tragedy so rich and so beautiful. These days, who isn't a foodie? I mean, my mom definitely isn't. Most menus 100% paralyze her with fear and dread. I think she would honestly rather die than try sushi. If a menu doesn't have chicken strips and french fries, or the option of what equates to a kid's menu hamburger with nothing on it,

you can literally see the fear on her face. She has the palate of an overly indulged, eight-year-old. My dad, not a foodie either. For him, Americanized chicken fried rice, pretty fucking exotic. Grandma Betty, definitely not. Her palate falls somewhere between my moms and my dad's. My stepdad views all vegetables with a tremendous amount of suspicion and disdain. It's like somebody routinely beat him with a bag of pre-mixed salad when he was a kid.

Nor are any of my aunts and uncles that I'm aware of, actually, now that I think about it. Okay, let me rephrase this question. Or statement. Most of us under the age of 50. I think, or either a foodie or we have foodies in our social circle.

It's become pretty common to actually want to try new things to be at least a little adventurous with our food choices to crave more than just basic sustenance. When that term first gained popularity in the 2000s,

it didn't just mean somebody who enjoyed French wine and Michelin-Star restaurants. Instead, it was the pursuit of the very best food with the broadest definition of that possible, like a pastry deserving of a two-hour weight

or a bowl of noodles. It'll be worth an international trip and a sort of insider trivia scene soon potted up around how the food came to be put on the plate in front of you, knowing the name of a restaurant's chef was good, but knowing the last four places that chef had worked even better. Foodies traded in Yelp reviews and chowhound posts offering tips on the most authentic tortillas and treatise on soup dumplings. Ultimately, foodies were not just people who enjoyed eating. They were fans of everything to do with food, where it was grown, who shaped it into a dish, how that information got shared with other foodies.

This new foodie subculture continued to grow and grow became more and more mainstream, and now it's more accessible than ever. Today, anybody living in a major city and in a growing number of smaller cities can get a wide variety of different cultures foods at their doorsteps in minutes thanks to things like Uber Eats and DoorDash. You can look up people from all kinds of cultures making food on YouTube and TikTok. If you live in a decent-sized city, you can probably find many of those ingredients at specialty grocery stores to make those things yourself.

You can read write-ups of new restaurants from the most esteemed critics and from aspiring newbies with a substack. The substack mentioned, not incidental here, for many of us foodies or part-time foodies reading about food, watching TV shows about food, social media videos, watching those about food, have become an integral part of modern food culture.

I mean, just think about how often you see people taking photos of their meals out of restaurants or how often you see the results of those photos on social media. How many comics have made jokes about this phenomenon? Almost nobody who considers themselves a foodie does so in isolation. It's about communication, writing, and showing. For a long time, though, being a foodie was not linked to a particular creative act.

If you're really, really obsessed over food, you were just thought of as being, well, kind of a greedy fucking slob. In the 19th century, there was something called a gourmand, broadly defined as someone who really took great place. pleasure and culinary delights. And even way back in 1825, lawyer and self-proclaimed Gormand, Jean, Anthelm, Briotte, Severon felt that the term was misunderstood. There is a perpetual confusion of Gormandism in its proper connotation with gluttony and veracity. He wrote in his seminal work, the physiology of taste. Gormandism, he argued, was not about mere excess, but about appreciation. It was an impassioned, considered in habitual preference for whatever pleases the taste. He wrote, a love of delicacies and an enemy of overindulgence. So the opposite, in fact, of mindless

gluttony. It wasn't about eating just a shit ton of food. It was about eating, you know, properly prepared, beautiful food. As for who can be a gourmand? Briot Savaron posited in the scientific fashion of the time that some were chosen by nature to have a heightened sense of taste. And I totally agree. I have this friend Isaac. Some of you met him at the first wet, hot, bad magic summer camp where he became known as not Dan, since he looks a lot like me. And people kept thinking that he was me. He was a restaurateur in another life for a while, had his own winery. He's an incredible cook and has an appreciation for food that I will never be able to fully share because his senses of smell and taste are so much more heightened and powerful than mine are.

I have a very muted sense of taste and smell. I blame a high school taekwondo accident or ended up with some nerve damage in my face, but who knows? Maybe I was just born that way. Whatever the cause, I frequently literally cannot smell things other people around me can't smell.

And when people talk about detecting notes of this or that or identifying this or that seasoning, I'm completely in the dark. I just physically cannot detect those things. Probably part of the reason I'm a shit cook. You don't want me to be the one working in the seasoning because I will add way too much salt, way too much pepper.

etc, to get it to a place where I can really taste it, which in all likelihood is going to completely ruin it for you. Maybe my lack of ability in this arena is why I'm so impressed by others who excel here. Isaac one time told me when I complimented him on his palate that he could guess the last meal I ate based on smelling my breath alone. And he fucking nailed it. It was weird, but he did it. It was like a crazy magician's trick that leaves you wondering if they know actual real magic

because you can't understand how it's possible. And it wasn't like I'd eaten it in a little. a tuna fish sandwich and onions, you know. I can't remember what it was, but it was, you know, more subtle than that. And I was just blown away that he got it one guess. Isaac, definitely a foodie, definitely a gourmand. And although a lot of people may be born a gourmand to take advantage of that in eight cents, you know, to its fullest requires some capital, some mullah.

Being rich doesn't automatically give one good taste, but, quote, anyone who can pile up a great deal of money easily is almost forced willy-nilly to be a Gourmand, according again to Briat-Severon. Of course, historically, most people simply haven't had access to amazing food all the time, due to conditions, various conditions, it's persisted well into the 20th century. In June of 1950, when English cooking writer Elizabeth David's A Book of Mediterranean Food was published in London, British adults were still living under the war rationing system. They were only allowed one fresh egg per week, leaving stale bread for the birds, even got you a fine of ten pounds. pounds, right? Don't you dare waste that bread stale or not? Moldy or not, knock the mold off, eat the rest. Britain's that day ate a lot of a wulton pie, made a baked root vegetables and chalk,

literally, calcium carbonate, which was a common additive to bread at that time to make it more nutritious and help prevent rickets and combat other nutritional deficiencies during the food shortage. While all that was happening, David's book reminded readers that food could do something more than just keep them alive. It could be fun, interesting, and creative. She followed a book of Mediterranean food with books on French and Italian food, and by the time her fourth book, summer cooking hit the shelves in 1955, Britain struggling through the wreckage that World War II had created, were finally ready to try her vibrant recipes.

After 5,291 consecutive days of food rationing, a food rationing. That's 14 and a half years. My God. Food rationing in the UK during and after World War II began on January 8, 1940, when bacon, butter, and sugar were first restricted, didn't officially and completely come to an end until July 4th, 1954, when the final restrictions on meat and bacon were lifted.

And while David was illuminating a sunnier, fresher cuisine for the British middle class, two Americans who had spent time in Europe were embarking on a similar colorary journeys that would change the eating habits of folks in their home country. One was Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher, a fluid rider who split time between California and France, sounds like a pretty delightful life

and whose subject happened to be food and dining. She had read David and had praised her for exploring gastronomical planets other than our own. In the mid-1950s, or other than her own, in the mid-1950s, MFK Fisher published her collection of food-centered writing, The Art of Eating, and like David's initial work,

it was a lyrical presentation of the joys of French and Mediterranean cuisine. The other major influence on the foodies scene from this period of time was James Beard. I imagine you've heard of him, most of you. After since as an actor, costume designer and caterer in New York, Beard found himself setting up officers' canteens in World War II as part of the United Seaman Service.

Beard's interest in the culture of food had led him to Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf, and he recalled how her mastery of the art of language, combined with her pure, primitive enjoyment of food, was revelatory. As it had been for Fisher, France was Beard's culinary training ground, and like Fisher, he found Elizabeth David in inspiration. Upon returning to New York, Beard published Paris cuisine in 1952. By 1954, the New York Times anointed Beard the dean of American cookery. And the next year, he began teaching New Yorkers to cook in the kitchen of his townhouse on 12th Street and Greenwich Village.

So much cool culture, music, fine art, the art of eating, social justice, etc., has come from Greenwich Village. Pretty magical place. And it was there in that magical place that the American Foodie Movement was born. Despite the efforts of fisher and beer to change Americans' perception of food and dining, for most Americans, food with sustenance. Full stop. French chef Jacques Popin, who was aghast to learn that the only mushrooms in American supermarkets came in a can, said that those Americans who saw food as something important, integral to a nation's culture were in the oddball minority here. But the movement towards refinement and taste becoming more and more mainstream was underway.

In 1961, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy hired. René Verdin to be the chef at the White House, where he grew vegetables on the roof with the executive mansion. It's pretty fucking cool. And prepared classic saucy French fare for the president and his family. I don't know about the mistresses. This was all, however, still a long ways from our modern foodic culture. The foodie culture that would rise during the 70s and peak during the 80s and 90s

was as a result of these fancy French fucks insisting on refined cuisine, both apolitical and, well, not actually very curious. It was about upper middle class to wealthy people trying interesting but still approachable things at a white tablecloth restaurant that bore the name of some fancy high-profile chef, even if that chef wasn't the one making the food. Nobody really cared about the history or political circumstances of where their food came from. It was about the prestige, the social cachet, the inaccessibility, the veneer of exclusivity. Think about all those mentions of Dorsia, an American psycho. God, I hate this place. The chick's restaurant.

Why aren't we at Dorsia? Because Bateman won't give the matriety head. Courtney? I can't. I'm thinking Dorcia. Dorsey is nice. Or something fabulous. Dorcia.

Yes, I know it's a little late, but is it possible to reserve a table for two at eight or eight-thirty perhaps? I feel like the reference it a hundred times in that complete masterpiece of a movie. And in that last scene, if you wonder, like, what was that other noise? Yeah, he has porn on in the background. Anyone who actually wanted to be adventurous To taste authentic food Would have to go out of their way to do so To travel to a big city and go to

Say Manhattan's Chinatown or little Italy Where they would then have to use their own street smarts And prior knowledge to figure out how to find And get what they wanted And were it not for one man That might still be the kind of foodie culture That we live in today And that man, of course

Is Ronald Mother fucking McDonald McDonald and hamburger eating us from Ronald McDonald. Now, where is that clown? Oh, Ronald, Ronald, Ronald. Ronald. Hey, Ronald.

Here I am, kids. Hey, you isn't watching TV fun? Especially when you got delicious McDonald's hamburgers. Ronald, you can't be on TV and watch it at the same time. Now, come on and meet the boys and girls. Oh, we've already met. I know. That's the first ever McDonald's commercial, and the first time Ronald appeared.

A character created originally voiced by Weatherman Willard Scott, and it feels like that is the beginning of a trailer for a horror movie. Like it could turn it any second. You know, like he's going to be like, well, we already met when I sent them to the other place in the basement, when I delivered their precious souls across the Black River to the island of goblins and restless sleep. No.

I feel like that. I feel like that I was turning Ronald McDonald into, Randy Macho Man Savage there. Hey, brother. Get in the fucking basement with me, brother. I got the clown makeup on. Oh, yeah. No, the man who changed foodic culture was Anthony Bourdain.

Who made it to his life's mission to disrupt previous foodie norms to eat both the foie gras and the pig's ears, the elevated and street fare. And perhaps more importantly, he made it his mission to reveal the real people who are actually working in the kitchen, including the immigrants,

the ex-cons, the addicts, the recovering addicts, all of them work in long hours for low pay and virtually no benefits. And he could do this because he was one of them. For many years, Bordane's struggle with heroin addiction, crack cocaine addiction, and seemingly throughout his life, a sort of all-or-nothing personality

that would both help him become a media juggernaut and also haunt his personal life. And he didn't hide his demons or humble beginnings. In fact, he was open about them at a time when most chefs were still caught in the persona of supreme respectability. In other words, he was underground punk rock when a lot of the food culture was still overproduced pop. Unlike other chefs, he immersed himself into every dish, trying not to only understand how it was made and who made it,

but also the greater cultural, political, and social context that had created it in the first place. And to Bordane, this way of thinking didn't just lead you to ingredients you might be able to buy and master yourself. It led to a whole different kind of life. And that life was hard on the body and mind. Typically, even the most ardently countercultural figures get groucher and stiffer as they age and their egos get more and more in the way of their work. But Anthony Bourdain seemed immune to that particular sickness. In the hours of programming, he recorded. He was always happy to play the student and not the teacher in the kitchen on the streets and the places in between.

For that reason, when news broke of his death in June of 2018, it seemed unbelievable. And a lot of people, my wife, Lindsay, included, who had long been a huge Bordane fan. you know, hit him really, really hard. How could a guy who had introduced the world not only to food, but to a different mindset about what food even was, what it could be, make that decision? How could a guy who embody what it meant to always be curious, always be learning, always be engaged with the world,

with a sense of childlike wonder, a guy who also seemed to be looking forward to the next adventure continually, a guy with a young daughter, just 11 years old, decide that his life, his seemingly wonderful, beautiful life, was no longer worth living. Let's head into today's time-suck timeline to explore the beautiful rough around the edge of life and try and figure out why he, you know, what led him to his perplexing death, the death of Anthony Bourdain. Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-suck timeline. Pierre Bourdain, Anthony Bordain's father, was born in 1930 in Manhattan to a father who had immigrated from Archishon, France,

Ocasin of France after World War I. Pierre went to what his son Christopher would describe as an amazingly globalist school, the Birch-Watson school, founded by two progressives who believed that for democracy to work properly, young people had to be highly educated. Ah, what a crazy notion. Refreshing during a time when too many politicians here in the States blatantly seemed to want young people, really all people, outside of their inner circles, to be dumb as fuck, and thus more easily manipulated and controlled.

Pierre would go on to attend Yale University, also serve in the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1953, the woman who become Anthony Bourdain's mother, Gladys Saxman, born in 1934, into very different circumstances. She grew up in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, and then later attended Hunter College, now called Lehman College,

just a few blocks from her parents' apartment. She never dreamed of marrying a kind of guy like Pierre Bourdain, a dashing French-American who seemed to be going places, a man who loved finer culture in the opera, a man whose family was rich. But the two would meet, fall in love and get married in 1954, and Anthony or Tony, as he was called by those who knew him best, was born on June 25, 1956. And his brother Chris followed three years later in May of 1959.

At the time of his son's births, Pierre was a salesman at a New York City camera store, as well as a floor manager at a record store. Pretty fucking cool gig. He was artsy and fun. Both kids would spend their early years in Manhattan in an apartment filled with vinyl records and books about foreign films which Pierre and Gladys both loved. This appreciation for art made them resistant

to the tide of paranoid McCarthyism sweeping the country in the 1950s. But the Bordains, not always loud and proud progressives. In some ways, they refuse to be. Growing up, Anthony and Christopher would not know that their mother was Jewish. In the 1950s, if you wanted to achieve social mobility and move to a nice suburb, being Jewish could potentially redline you and keep you from owning certain property, joining certain country clubs, etc.

Gladys would swear her husband to secrecy about her cultural origins so that they could move to one such suburb. Lidonia, New Jersey. Leonia. There we go. What a strange thing. To want to move to a place where your neighbors would be disgusted by you if they knew what ethnicity you really were and what culture you were raised in.

Me personally. Growing up what most people would consider a. a white trash culture, I began to harbor a pretty strong disdain towards people who looked down their noses at others with less like my family, myself. And I found I still find the country club crowd, boring, vapid, and soulless overall. I'd rather stay home and be alone and spend the day golf on with some lame-ass people making lame-ass jokes and spitting out, regurgitated, and poorly thought-out hot takes. I know that's not everybody in the country club crowd, by the way, but in my experience, it is a fucking lot of them. She said that her maiden name

Saxman was actually Saxon as an Anglo-Saxon since she had technically been born in her parents' apartment in the upper 70s at the Upper West Side. She always said she was from there rather than from where she actually grew up in the Bronx. Chris and Tony wouldn't find out about their mom's maiden name, how it was actually spelled in their cultural heritage until they were in high school, which is crazy. In most other ways, though, they had a pretty good conventional childhood. As Tony would later write, I did not want for love or attention. My parents love me. Neither of them drank to excess. Nobody beat me. God was never mentioned, so I was annoyed by neither church nor any notion of sin or damnation. Chris and Tony would attend public school in Leonia, New Jersey, and it was immediately clear that Tony was bright. He could read at a fifth and sixth grade level at the very beginning of elementary school. He loved writing especially when other kids were still learning how to spell the basics and just string very crude sentences together. He wrote a long composition about a French explorer who discovered the Western and part of France. Not only that, but he was also a great illustrator, very talented

kid. And that naturally drew the attention of bullies. Oh, he's smart, huh? Oh, you got talent and shit? Fuck you! You make me feel bad about me! You talented enough to dodge his fist? You scorn a little bitch? Right, those people have always been around. Eventually, a teacher recommended that Gladys and Pierre pulled her son out of a public school and put him in a private one, one town over, due to the constant bullying, and due to him not being challenged enough by the curriculum. Around that same time, Pierre's mother died, leaving him an inheritance, and Pierre would take the opportunity to send both boys to private school. More money also meant the opportunity to travel,

and Pierre and Gladys would take the boys to his aunt and uncle's house in the southwest of France, where the boys got their first taste of French cuisine. On the voyage to France, on the Queen Mary, man, back in people who travel out by ship, Tony tried a dish called Vichers, some kind of cold soup. I'm probably pronouncing wrong, made of cooked and pureed leaks, potatoes, onions, and cream, garnish with chopped chives. The Vichas was an eye-opener to him

because he had previously only experienced, you know, hot soup made from condensed cans, like Campbell's type of stuff. He described it in Kitchen Confidential as the, quote, first food I really noticed. It was the first food I enjoyed and, more important, remembered enjoying. He also found out that French children were allowed to drink a glass of wine and even have a cigarette with their meals on Sundays. All of this allowed him to consider the possibility that food wasn't just different depending on where you were.

It was a portal to a whole other way of life. Also during the trip to France, Tony and his family went out on a boat with some oyster fishermen. And one of the fishermen cracked open an oyster handed it over to the still elementary school aged Bourdain. And rather than be disgusted by the raw, slimy flesh, Tony was thrilled. As he later wrote in again a kitchen confidential. and in that unforgettable sweet moment in my personal history, that one moment, still more alive for me than so many of the other first, which followed, first pussy, first joint, first day in high school, first published book, or any other thing, I attained glory. Monsieur Sanjure beckoned me over to the gunwale where he leaned over, reached down until his head nearly disappeared under water, and emerged holding a single silt-encrusted oyster huge and irregularly shaped in his rough claw-like face. wrist-covered oyster knife, he popped the thing open and handed it to me, everyone watching

now my little brother shrinking away from this glistening, vaguely sexual-looking object, still dripping and nearly alive. I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by the now beaming, monsieur, saint-jure, and with one bite and a slurp, wulfed it down. It tasted a seawar, of brine and flesh, and somehow of the future. Everything was different now, everything. I had not only survived, I had enjoyed. My parents shudders, my little brother's expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement, only reinforced the sense that I had somehow become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life, the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex

or some other new sensation, would all stem from this moment. Before heading home, Bourdain's family, bought what Chris described as a goofy British car and had it shipped back to New Jersey. And they embarked on a massive home renovation once they got back, redoing the kitchen and the downstairs bathrooms. But the inheritance money didn't last forever. And as Chris would describe it, after three or four years, the family was struggling. Still, Pierre never considered pulling his boys out of private school. He would work harder, leaving early every day on the bus while Gladda stayed home and kept the house and cooked. Being married to a French husband had gotten her into French cuisine.

And like many other women in the country, there was another driving factor getting her into French cuisine, Julia Child. Julia Child presents the chicken sisters. Miss Breiler, Miss Friar, Miss Roaster, Miss Capernette, Miss Stewer, and Old Madam Hen. Julia Child could be a whole other episode. But let's go over her briefly here. Today we do, I think we tend to think of French cooking as the standard family. fancy type of cooking, I do, right? If you want to make something really impressive, chances are that French cuisine comes to mind is the most elevated and elegant form of food making.

But for a long time, Americans thought that there was no way people could actually make that shit at home. Indeed, for much of the 20th century, as people started to travel internationally more and get exposed to different cultures, there was a sharp divide between what was considered restaurant fare and what you could find at your average suburban housewife's kitchen. at restaurants you might be exposed to Kalkovan, steak fritz, beef, Borgonan, but at home, you're much more likely to see a woman making beef stroganoff

or tuna casserole. I fucking love tuna casserole, by the way. Many women in the mid-20th century, America desperately wanted to be fancy chefs. After all, when most of women's lives were relegated to the home, this was one of the only past to get praise and prestige, but it simply was not considered possible.

Julia Child would change that. And let's find out how after today's first two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads ever again, please sign out to be a space hazard on Patreon. Help us make monthly charitable contributions, get the catalog ad free, episodes three days early, and more. Okay, now let's learn about America's first celebrity TV chef, Julia Child. Born on August 15th, 1912 in Pasadena, California, Julia Carolyn McWilliams grew up in a life of wealth and privilege. Her dad was a banker and wealthy landowner. Her mom had come from the wealthy Weston family,

owners of the Western Paper Company back in Massachusetts. Both of her parents were extremely civic-minded, believing it was their job to raise the next generation with good values and the desire to give back, not just an appreciation for the finer things in life. For her high school education, child was sent to the Catherine Branson School for Girls of Preparatory School in Northern California.

There at six feet two inches tall, she was the natural choice to be captain of the school's basketball team, also president of the vagabonds, the hiking club. After graduating later from Smith College, a private women's college in Massachusetts in 1934, she spent a few years working various secretarial jobs before in September 1941, child began to volunteer with the past of the end of the chapter of the American Red Cross to help get the country ready for World War II. But when she tried to join the women's army corps, she was deemed too tall and rejected, too tall for standard issue uniforms, betting and the like, I imagine. On August 9th,

In 1942, though, she became a senior typist with the research unit of the Office of War information. Maybe several years into the war, certain agencies began to relax a bit on who they were willing to accept. At the close in 1942, child took out the position of junior research assistant with the secret intelligence branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, forerunner to the CIA, as we've talked about here on a bunch of different occasions. She undertook a variety of positions at the OSS, including clerk at the director's office, and administrative assistant in the registry of OSS. also eagerly volunteered to work for OSS overseas. From 1944 to 1945, she kept intelligence files for the OSS in India. Following years, she worked for the organization in China. I did not expect any of this to be in Julia Child's backstory.

Following the war, she married Paul Child, whom she had met while working for the OSS in India, where he worked for the U.S. Foreign Service. And in 1948, the couple was posted to Paris for Paul's work, and there Julia began to get into cooking. at the famous Le Coran Blue cooking school, Juliamette Simone Beck, and Louisette, Bertot. And together, the three women would publish the cookbook

mastering the art of French cooking in 1961. The child's then returned to the U.S. in the early 1960s, following that cookbook becoming a pretty big success, and they settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And soon afterwards, child was approached by some TV execs to host a cooking show, the French chef, thanks to the success of her book. And this was huge.

She would be the first woman to ever cook in front of a live studio audience on American television. The first woman to show other women the primary cooks for their families that cooking could be a creative pursuit as much as it was a duty. The French chef premiered as a show in 1963 on WGBH, the public TV station in Boston, Massachusetts, and it would air for a decade nationally on public television from February 11, 1963, to January 14th, 1973. Syndicated all over the place. not only did she show women that cooking was creative she also allowed herself to make mistakes that were not edited out or smoothed over and she emphasized using butter and cream even when health fads the 70s emphasized margarine and other healthier alternatives for julia was all about enjoying

and savoring food not just trying to optimize it and perhaps most importantly for our purposes here today she never gave up on being a writer for julia cooking wasn't just about putting something on a plate it was a whole narrative that a chef got to create and share a child expanded her literary endeavors by writing magazine articles and had a regular column for the Boston Globe. Over the year, she would author nearly 20 books, both independently and in collaboration with others. All in all, Julia would go on to be a role model

for Tony's generation of chefs, somebody who treasured the joy of making food with all its mess, mistakes, and stories over a perfect-looking final image. And before moving on from Julia, her TV show was so popular in the U.S. that Saturday Night Live paroded it in a classic sketch that I love,

where she was played by Dan Aykroyd. who badly cuts himself on making a chicken, starts bleeding a fucking ridiculous, cartoonish amount, just blood everywhere. And instead of leaving the show to get help, just keeps on cooking initially, like Julia would do when she made a mistake. And Julia loved, she had a good sense of humor, I guess,

and she loved this sketch so much, she showed it to her parents, and then would frequently show it to guests when they came over for dinner party. So here's just a little piece of it. Oh, well, anyway, it's time to bone the chicken. Now, for this, you need a very sharp knife. Can't do nothing without a sharp knife.

And you place the chicken on its stomach and cut along the backbone to the Pope's nose like so. Oh! Now I've done it. I've cut the dickens out of my finger. Well, I'm glad in a way this happened. You know, accidents do it.

So much blood. I've never really discussed what to do. First, you must stop the Indian. Her approach not taking herself too seriously, you know, made her beloved. Just as that approach. Coach Wood later with Anthony. Anthony's mom Gladys was a fan, and soon Gladys was branching out,

trying to make Chinese food from Sichuan cookbooks as well. Chris would later recall that they were the first families on their street to own a walk. Fucking walk. I remember finding out my new stepmom had a walk when I was in junior high and thinking like, holy shit, she is worldly. She is sophisticated. I think I thought she must have gotten it during some trip to Asia, which she never took. Just, you know, so exotic.

I think she actually bought it at Macy's. Not everything was perfect, though, in the Bourdain house, at least not from Tony's perspective. Though he valued the closeness he had with his parents, Tony was jealous of the lack of parental supervision that a lot of his classmates had, the freedom they had at home to be interested in their own pursuits. He felt that Gladys especially was overbearing. And so he turned to friends he was making at the Englewood School for Boys to share his true goals and dreams. He usually preferred his friends to be older, meaning he was regularly spending time with kids in 11th and 12th grade. they were in the New Jersey suburbs, meaning there wasn't much to do, but drive around, smoke weed, smoke hash, get a bite to eat. Occasionally somebody would score some acid.

Teens would go to a pool party, trip balls. But most of the time, they were hanging out, listening to records, drawing, playing the drums and guitars, you know, just doing creative shit like that. And Mama Gladys was worried. It seemed to her like Tony was heading down a dark path, looking like he was going to turn out to be a degenerate hippie of some kind. Wasn't he was a bad kid? He was always home for dinner. but he didn't seem to care about grades like she wanted him to, and he had a certain restlessness that worried her.

Soon, Gladys and Tony were regularly getting in fights about drugs, about hanging out with the wrong crowd, about disrespecting the system. She was worried that Pierre had not set a good example for the boys. He had never been particularly successful in his career, in her eyes at least, and had lost jobs numerous times, not for actual mistakes, but because he refused to play corporate politics and climbed the latter, or so he said. Pierre much preferred reading biographies and history books,

playing games at home. Gladys hoped that sending the boys to private school, where many of the students came from very wealthy, high-achieving families. Families had second houses and vacation frequently in Europe would make them aspire to have grander careers and be more ambitious than their father. But for Tony opening the door to find debt collectors on the stoop on more than one occasion during high school had not inspired him to dream big. In his view, it's better to go for small jobs that weren't too stressful, not worry about it too much. You know, get just enough money to live through the life you enjoyed.

So in high school, he mowed lawns, had a paper route, then got a job as a bike messenger in Manhattan. That last one would be especially influential on him, being a bike messenger. He loved it. Back in the day before, fax machines and emails, Manhattan's illustrious avenues were a parade of young bike messengers like Tony delivering everything companies needed to send to other locations, legal documents, film, photos, etc. advertising agencies on Madison Avenue especially muted a fleet of bike messengers to transport cans of film that had to be physically developed

in Nevada chemicals, usually over near 12th Avenue or in Tribeca. Tony, he was 17, would take to the job spectacularly, thriving off of the city's fast-paced energy. If you managed to hold onto a bus, he'd just take that for a couple blocks, you know, just pedaling off for the thrill of it.

Meanwhile, Tony also started seeing a girl from his high school's sister school, Nancy Pukowski, He had fallen for her hard, but Nancy, who was a year older than him, was soon headed off to Vassar, and Tony wanted to follow her, and he would.

He also wanted to get away from his mom. Gladys was increasingly breathing down his neck, he felt. The summer when Tony was 17, his aunt and uncle on his father's side, the ones in France, they then died, leaving their house to the Bourdain family, and Tony, Chris, and Gladys would travel back to France, get the house ready to sell.

The two boys were alone with their mom for six weeks, and more than ever before. they noticed how incredibly judgmental she was, how humorless. They felt like she didn't appreciate anybody who wanted to live their lives in a way different than hers. Maybe she was clinging to the same notion of respectability she had felt she had needed for whatever reason when she moved into a gated community that wouldn't accept her Jewish heritage. She seemed to have been locked into that keeping up with the Jones's status-driven mindset so many people fall, you know, pray to or fall into. Back at home afterwards, Tony would end up scraping together enough credits to graduate a year early, so he could follow his girlfriend.

And from there, it was off to Vassar in 1973. And Vassar had one of Tony's other favorite pastimes in spades, drugs. Counterculture had already spread across the country on college campuses, of course, years earlier. Vassar, particularly notorious for being a haven for free thinking and the chemically enhanced. In the 1970s, Vassar had even made the front page of New York Times for the number of quailudes available on campus. And in addition to quailudes, there was cocaine, good shit without the United States. the risk of fentanyl, shit that had not been stomped on with everything under the kitchen sink and LSD, which soon became among Tony's favorites.

I mean, clean coke, early 70s acid when you're in late teens. Dear God, sounds incredible. Tony was soon fast friends with anybody who liked to drink and do drugs. With no parental limits on his behavior, he was free to do whatever he wanted, including shit like showing up to a stranger's house in the middle of the night and robbing their refrigerator if he was hungry. Other times, he'd break into the gym, go skinny dipping in the pool, while he was high out of his mind. He was having a legendary time,

but also he had very little direction when it came to what he actually wanted to do with his life. And later on, Tony would recognize that, as he would write, I spent most of my waking hours drinking, smoking pot, scheming, and doing my best to amuse, outrage, impress, and penetrate anyone silly enough to find me entertaining.

I was, to be frank, a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass kicking. he would soon receive that ass kicking in a very unexpected place. In the summer of 1974, or 1974, not backing up 30 years, Nancy Pukowski, who Anthony was still dating, decided she was going to go to Provincetown, Cape Cod to find a job for the summer. Unique place. Currently, they're a year-round population, less than 4,000 people, but in the summer, it soars to around 60,000, the quintessential coastal beach summertime.

Tony tagged along to the, as he would write, Once quaint New England port town, now clogged with tourists, day-trippers, hippies, drifters, lobster poachers, slutty chicks, dopers, refugees from Key West, and thousands upon thousands of energetically cruising gay men. As Tony would put it, for a rootless young man with sensualist inclinations, it was the perfect getaway. And again, this sounds incredible. A town full of sex and music loving, free-living young people, clean drugs? Fuck yeah, bro. Hey Lucifina. He found a job dishwashing at the flagship, a steak and fried seafood place that would stay open in various forms until 2004.

Actually, they would not give him the job at first, but since dishwashers or sudbusters or pearl divers, as they were called there, were the most unreliable part of the seasonal restaurant business, when one guy failed to show up for work for two days, Tony was next in line, and he was in. And he did not make a great first impression with the rest of the staff. He didn't know shit about how kitchens worked, didn't have the natural. deference to authority that makes kitchens run, right? Head chefs above sous chef, sous chefs, above dishwashers, but he was good at selling. He was good at getting waiters to push a special, for example. He seemingly knew how to talk about food in a way that compelled everybody else to want it. And he found he absolutely loved the people who worked there. The management was a retired couple who stayed out of the kitchen. The waitresses were smoking hot,

generally single, young women. The chefs, even though they were mostly down and out local somehow had a superstar quality about them that infused everything they did with magic. As Tony would later describe it, in the kitchen, they were like gods. They dressed like pirates, chef's coats with the arms slashed off, blue jeans, ragged and faded headbands, gore-covered aprons, gold hoop earrings, wrist cuffs, turquoise necklaces and chokers, rings, a scrimshaw, ivory, tattoos, all the decorative detritus of the long past summer of love. They had style and swagger, and they seemed to afraid of nothing. They drank everything in sight, stole whatever was it nailed down,

and screwed their way through the floor staff, bar customers, and casual visitors alike, nothing I'd ever seen or imagined. They carried big, badass knives, which they kept honed and sharpened to a razor's edge. They hurled dirty saute pans and pots across the kitchen and into my pot sink with casual accuracy. They looted the place for everything it was worth. Stocking up well in advance for the lean months of the off-season, joints were smoked and the downstairs walk in, cocaine was always available, though in those days, very expensive and still considered a rich man's drug, but it was everywhere. On payday, everyone in the kitchen handed money back and forth in a Byzantine rondelay of transactions as the cooks settled up the previous

weeks drug debts, loans, and wagers. I was impressed. These guys were master criminals and sexual athletes compared to my pitiful college hijinks. He did have a fucking great way of writing. When Tony burned himself early on by reaching for a hot pan. He was astounded when one of the cooks, a guy named Tyrone, simply grabbed the same pan with his bare hands and put it in front of Tony, completely unharmed, as everyone in the kitchen giggled. The next summer, he returned to Provincetown and started a catering company with a guy he had met at the flagship named Alex Gitmanoff. The catering company was called Moonlight Menus, because they were actually moonlighting out of another restaurant's kitchen, using their tools and ingredients. This meant working all day at the flagship, and then all night doing

catering, meaning the two were regularly pulling 18-hour days in an unlit basement. Nancy Pukowski, his Polish princess, worked alongside them as their prep cook, cleaning the pots, doing the chopping, making soups and other simple dishes. When they got tired, there was always enough cocaine to finish the job. Finally, when everything was done, they would simply take a nap on the banquets and then start the whole thing over again the next morning. And all this hard work paid off. They catered a bunch of staff parties for different companies in town, even a wedding, though it went according to Alex disastrously when they severely overcooked the roast that was supposed to be the wedding banquet centerpiece.

But they improv, they adapted. Tony took one shift of serving, telling guests the rare part was just coming up. And Alex took the second shift telling guests, oh, man, you just missed the rare slices. He also found work at another restaurant. The lobster pot still open today, April through November. They were burning the candle at both ends. And this chaos was exactly the lifestyle that young Tony craved. By the end of the summer, Tony had no intention of going.

back to Vassar. School no longer interested him. He got an A's on papers, even ghostwritten assignments for other students, but that didn't matter to him. Cooking now did. His dad, Pierre, was friends with the restaurateur who managed to get Tony on the waiting list for the Culinary Institute of America, the CIA. The CIA was founded in 1946, this CIA, to provide vocational training for veterans returning from World War II. Then it quickly became the culinary center for the entire nation. Its first 16-week class had 50 students, and a faculty had just one chef, one baker, and one dietitian. Just a year later, board member Catherine Angel secured a larger five-acre site with three buildings. A second year of study was added to the program, and the name of the school

was changed to the Restaurant Institute of Connecticut. By 1951, the school had graduated 600 veterans from 38 states and changed its name a final time to the Culinary Institute of America. The CIA would be the first culinary college to grant associate degrees in culinary arts in 1971, then the first to grant bachelor's and master's degrees in 1993 and 2023, respectively, also became the first to open a student-run on-campus restaurant to the public, pioneering this often-imitated model of student training. In 1970, the school decided it was time to move out of New Haven, and after an exhaustive search,

the CIA would purchase the St. Andrew on Hudson Jesuit Noviceet in Hyde Park, New York, just north of Poughkeepske for its new campus. And life there was intense. When the college was founded, there wasn't really a career path for cooks. Cooking was viewed as an unstable, often temporary trade rather than a profession. You know, it's something you did if you couldn't find a better job, something you did between real jobs. From its earliest days, the CIA set about creating a more positive image for culinary careers in the U.S., setting high standards for professional conduct, including behavior, language, work habits, employee relations, sanitation, and a strict uniform dress code. As Tony would describe one course,

vegetable cookery was a much feared class. The terrifying chef Banya was in charge, and he made the simple preparing of vegetables, a rigorous program on par with Paris Island. He was an Italian Swiss, but liked to use a German accent for effect, slipping quietly up behind students mid-task and screaming questions at the top of his lungs.

Recite for me, Schnell! How to make a palm dauphinwas! Chef Banya would then helpfully provide misleading incorrect clues. Then you add zian. Yeah? He would wait for his flustered victim to fall into his trap and then shriek. Nine!

Nine! There's no onions in the palm daffernots! He was a bully, bit of a sadist and a showman. But the man knew his vegetables. And he knew what pressure was. Anyone who couldn't take Chef Banyers' ranting was not going to make it in the outside world. It was a long way from Vassar, where overly indulgent professors had allowed Tony to be as weird as he wanted to be, where he had spent his last semester wearing fucking nunchucks

and a strap-on holster carrying around a samurai sword. Just for kicks. Shit like that was not tolerated at the CIA. But despite not allowing any weird hijinks, Tony thrived there. For Tony graduation for the CIA, the final assignment was to make a very formal French-style high-end dinner that the students would also serve themselves. And he wrote,

The final class before graduation was the dreaded yet yearn for e-room, the Escofier room and opened to the public three-star restaurant operated for profit by the school, Tony would write. A large window allowed customers to watch the fearsome chef as Chef Bernard lined up his charges for inspection, assigned the day's workstations, reviewed the crimes and horrors and disappointments of the previous night's efforts. This was a terrifying moment, as we all dreaded the souffle station, the one station, where one was assured of drawing the full weight of Chef Bernard's wrath and displeasure.

The likelihood of its screw-up was highest here, too. It was certain that at least one of your, you know, a la-minute soufflays would, under real working conditions, fail to rise, rise unevenly, collapse in on itself, in some way failed to meet our leader's exacting standards. If you screwed up, you would get what was called the ten minutes. In full view of the gawking public and quivering comrades, the offended souffle cook would be called forward to stand at attention, while the intimidating old French master would look down his gallic schnaz

and unload the most withering barrage of scorn any of us had ever experienced. In the end, Tony avoided that score. He aced his final exam, graduated in 1970. From there, it was time to go to New York City where Tony had a friend who was working at the WPA, a popular Soho hotspot located at 152 Spring Street. Inside, the restaurant featured black and white social realist murals of workers

and an art deco-style skylight room with trees growing toward the ceiling. Sounds gorgeous. It was a regular meeting spot for celebrated and famous artists. For example, in February of 1979, Andy Warhol, brought a group to the restaurant and reportedly bought some small paintings from a young teenage Jean-Michel Baskia who was selling his art outside.

And what an investment that was. Before he tragically died of a heroin overdose at the young age of 27 in 1988, Jean-Michel was a superstar in the art world. Decades after his death in 2017, untitled, a 1982 Basquia painting depicted in a black school with red and yellow rivulets, sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million. That's fucking insane. Over $110 million for one painting.

At this particular in vogue restaurant, Tony would start to have dreams about expanding beyond cooking, maybe do a TV show, showed chefs sitting around the kitchen, telling their stories. In fact, he couldn't believe that other people, at least other Americans, didn't seem to find chefs as fascinating as he did.

When Tony came back from another trip to France in the winter of 1979 or 1980, when he would have been 23 or 24, He told his friends at the restaurant, you won't fucking believe it. Over there, chefs are like athletes, like rock stars. For now, Tony's new dream of being on TV would have to wait, though. America, not even close to being ready for that. And Tony would have to focus on supporting himself.

At first, Tony and Nancy, still together. Both lived in her sister's apartment on the Upper West Side, a great location for the young couple near the subway in Columbia University, with affordable student-oriented dining available up the street and a nice view of the Hudson River. around 1979, the two would get their own apartment in the same building. And though they did not see their families often, they would have both Nancy and Tony's parents over every Easter,

pretending that Tony was living somewhere else because Nancy's family were devout Roman Catholics, who would not stand for the two living in sin. Also around this time, family-wise, things were not going well for Tony's parents, Pierre and Gladys. The two would separate in sometime around 1979, 1980, then a couple years later, Pierre would move in with another woman who Chris would remember as being nice to him

in a way that Gladys never was. In 1983, Tony started working at Nikki and Kelly, a restaurant on 77th in Columbus. The owners had just fired their chef who had locked himself in the office with the mountain of cocaine one night and went a little nuts, which, you know, tracks, mountains of coke,

tend to fucking make people do that. They then hired Tony, and he brought in Sam Goldman and his Provincetown buddy Alex Getmanoff. He also never gave up on his dreams of writing. In 1983 or 1984, he submitted a comic book to a magazine called Between C and D. The editor wrote back that it was interesting.

The drawings were just okay, but the writing was actually pretty good. The next thing the editor knew, somebody was ringing the buzzer downstairs. Tony Bourdain. On a break from cooking, he had run down to second street to talk to the editor about his submission. He also had another purpose in taking a break. He was scoring some heroin. He had first started using heroin in 1980 at the age of 24 when he bought his first bag on Rivington Street in the Lower East Side. That's a famous street.

George Burns used to live on Rivington Street And a portion of that street was used As the cover art for the Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique From then on he would use heroin regularly Never tried heroin myself I think we all know though that it's You know, has a reputation As discussed in numerous episodes

Elsewhere all over the fucking place, I'm sure For being notoriously addictive Heroin was as you might already be thinking Not necessarily a drug that was super compatible With working in a fast-paced high-pressure environment Indeed, it was more of an after-hours drug, something to mellow out with after spending an all day in a sweltering kitchen, helped you relax, come back down to earth,

after snorting or smoking, copious amounts of coke, and there were more drugs, too, that Tony was using regularly. Alcohol, volume, acid, weed, and a whole bunch of different kinds of pills. And nobody really cared. Most restaurants' kitchen at the time were havens for drugs. As long as you showed up and got the job done, nobody at the restaurant gave a fuck how many drugs you were on. However, pretty soon, Tony, not always showing up.

not getting the job done. One day everything went to hell in a handbasket, according to some colleagues. Tony had disappeared to go tanning, something I guess she was known for. His nickname at the time was Zonker, after the character from the Dunesbury, cartoon strip, Zonker Harris,

who was a professional tanner. And why was he tanning so aggressively? Well, some thought he just liked to sprawl out in the sun for four or five hours, swim a little bit, have some beer and beach fried food. Others thought it was to hide the sickly pallor of his heroin addiction

that was now his true skin tone. Within a few months, Tony and the gang, after Tony was fired, had moved on to another restaurant where Tony quickly got back to his ways, charming everybody inside the restaurant at first, then later conveniently disappearing when it came time to get to work. But at a high volume, high-stress place,

not always possible to disappear. So we started using heroin on the job, too. As one colleague would later describe it, one busy night I went down into the dry goods area to get something, and walking past the linen area, there were these enormous bags of linens, and Tony was passed out on them. A few months later, after Tony got fired again,

it was onto a place called Giannis. which was a huge step up. Johnny's had a bigger kitchen, more equipment, needed more staff. Tony loved the environment there in the bathrooms. He would draw caricatures of people from the restaurant, staff, waiters, food critics using his old cartooning skills. But his humor and his charm could not make up for his constant disappearances.

And soon he was fired again. And then again, and then again, balancing between jobs, trying to improve his own reputation, the tight-knit circles of fine dining, which is tough when you keep getting fucking fired, taking refuge and drugs, when the pressure got to be too much.

Even when he did manage to find, find a steady job working in a restaurant, not for the feign of heart, as Tony would go on to write and kitchen confidential. Line cooking done well is a beautiful thing to watch. It's a high-speed collaboration resembling at its best ballet or modern dance. A properly organized, fully loaded line cook, one who works clean and has moves, meaning economy of movement, nice technique, and most important speed can perform his duties with Noginski-like grace. The job requires character and endurance. A good line cook never shows up late, never calls in sick, and works through pain and injury.

What most people don't get about professional level cooking is that it is not at all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavors, and textures that presumably was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking, the real business of preparing the food you eat is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition. The same series of tasks performed over and over and over and over. again in exactly the same way. The last thing a chef wants in a line cook

is an innovator. Somebody with ideas of his own who is going to mess around with the chef's recipes and presentations. Chefs require blind, near fanatical loyalty, a strong back and an automaton-like consistency of execution under battlefield. While working in so many different kitchens stimulated Tony, it also pushed him closer and closer to burnout. And while the drugs helped, they also introduced a whole set of other complications, of course. and soon it was all becoming too much.

Adding to his burnout was the low pay, no benefits, the constant turmoil of restaurants opening and closing, the egos of restaurant owners. But he didn't have a backup plan, so he kept grinding. Then after years, a pseudo-deception. Tony and Nancy eventually got married in September of 1995 in one of the chapels at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Location, probably not Tony's first choice.

He was a lifelong atheist, but he wanted to please his Polish wife's family. they had a reception on the Upper East Side and then they could finally tell everybody in their lives that they actually live together. A few years later in April of 1987 when Tony was just 40, his father Pierre Bourdain

would pass away and he would leave Tony and his brother Chris with an inheritance. A big one, about a quarter of a million dollars each, equivalent to over $700,000 each today. Damn, despite struggling here and there not living up to Gladys' expectations, dude ended up with a pretty good chunk of cash. Let's find out how Tony and his bro used their inheritance after today's second and two mid-show sponsor breaks.

Thanks for listening to those sponsors. I hope you heard some deals that you liked. Now, where did that half a million dollar inheritance go? Well, Christopher used his half of the money to buy a house. And at first, Tony and Nancy had the same idea. They wanted to buy a little casita, two-room house down in St. Martin, a 34-square-mile Caribbean island with 37 beaches that is uniquely shared by two nations. the southern Dutch side, the northern French side, a place where it was much cheaper to live

than it was in New York City. They could have bought a place there and had a ton of money left over to live on. In Tony's later view, that could have been his ticket out. He could have lived down there, could have went to the beach every day, found a job in a local restaurant if he needed to. But according to the couple's high school friend,

Scott Formosa, the money ended up going straight into the couple's veins. Yeah, both of them were using heroin for years. and soon with money becoming more and more of an issue and now the new inheritance or no new inheritance rather coming Tony had to get creative to keep paying the bills One summer he offered an old friend Alex Demetrov a place to stay

He offered him his mom Gladys's apartment While she was away in Paris Tony arranged the whole thing Taking rent money from Alex But as Alex was leaving He ran right into Gladys Who was coming home And apparently she had no fucking idea

That Tony was subletting her place She never got any money for it Man what a low point ripping off your mom while you're in your 40s. That could not have felt great for heroin money. Yeah, because the money went straight to more heroin. In the mid-1980s, Tony would try and get clean, but adding recovery to the pressure of cooking was much more difficult than he'd expected,

and he ended up turning to another drug. Crack cocaine. Sweet Jesus. Heroin? That is not a successful path. He was not fucking around. Trading one drug for another, let him stay on the roller coaster ride or restaurant work for a little while, though. I'm saying a restaurant work.

also gave him much needed structure, if he happened to be working for a particularly hard-ass chef. But crack cocaine, unsurprisingly, was fucking horrible for him. In the long run, of course it was. It's fucking crack. It's horrible for literally everybody, eventually. There are no highly functioning crack addicts, not for long.

At his lowest point, Tony would quote, comb the shag carpet for paint chips in the hope that they were falling crack bits. Smoking them anyway, just fucking smoke and paint. Around 1990, he stopped using hard drugs. stopped for good in his mid-40s after checking into rehab. He had never became, excuse me, completely sober, though. Still drank, still smoked cigarettes, a lot of cigarettes, chain smoking.

But at least he was now able to hold down steady jobs. And he stayed married. He and Nancy still together. In the early 90s, it was the kitchen at the supper club. By 1995, he had moved on to 1 5th Avenue as far as working. Then moved on to Coco Paso Teatro, where after shifts, the staff would cramming to Tony's tiny office to hear his crazy debauchress tale. They loved them. And soon he started thinking about how to turn these stories into a book.

So, he started writing a novel. At the time, a publisher at Random House named David Rosenthal, had made a deal to do a distribution of the old farmer's almanac and some spin-off books. The person who reped the old farmer's almanac was Gordon Howard, and Gordon had something to tell David. He said, I know this guy who's written a novel, and it's really good. I was his college roommate. At first, David was not interested at all in his view.

There was nothing worse than getting books from civilians, people who spent their entire lives thinking they could be authors just because they could slap together a few coherent sentences. But in the end he said, okay, he read it and then within a few days, well, started to read it. And within a few days, he'd read the entire thing and fucking loved it. It was called Bone in the Throat by Anthony Bourdain. Tony had figured that somebody would need a hook to read a book about a kitchen,

and so he decided to incorporate a crime story. Here is a description of the plot. When up-and-coming chef, Tommy Pagana, settles for a less than glamorous stint at his uncle's restaurant in Manhattan's Little Italy, he unwittingly finds himself a partner in big-time crime. And when the mob decides to use the kitchen for a murder, nothing Tommy learned in cooking school had prepared him for what would happen next. With the FBI on one side and his eccentric wise guy superiors on the other,

Tommy has to struggle to do right by his conscience and to avoid getting killed in the meantime. Random House would publish this book in 1995. You can go by and read it now. But it was not a hit. Not at all. Not many bookstores a bit on adding to their shelves. Sales were very low.

No one in the book world knew who he was. was known in the restaurant world outside of New York City knew who he was still not wanting to give up on his friend gordon would uh give Tony some money and advance of sorts to go somewhere and write a new book but Tony was already aiming for something bigger than that that same year 1995 Tony had met Rob and Webb stone two Harvard educated brothers who worked together in book and film development I guess his name was Webb okay uh the brothers were tasked with developing a project for Tribeca productions the same company that created Kate Fear uh that De Niro film back in 1991 Bronx Tale in 93.

They've done a ton of memorable films since. And they were looking for a narrative at this time based on the true story of an extremely corrupt cop, a detective who had spent a couple decades on the job, whom De Niro planned to play in the upcoming movie. Tribeca wanted their brothers to develop a nonfiction book out of this story, which they would then use as a launch pad for a movie. And the brothers thought Tony would be a great person to write it,

somebody with a quintessential New York voice. This particular book project would end up dying on the vine, but Tony would stay connected with the stone. and would try to develop another project with them. As Webb would later summarize it, from 1984 to 1996, members of the Genovese crime family and the U.S. government

partnered to run a restaurant in New York's Little Italy. The food was not good. This is that story. Okay? Once again, Tony was hard at work. Meanwhile, he was also working on his next novel, Gone Bamboo.

Another work of fiction described as a fast-paced, humorous crime thriller, which would be published through an imprint called Villard in 1990. The New York Times even did a profile on him. Pot Boiler Dreams. Chef hopes to write his way out of the kitchen.

But other than that, his publisher couldn't get the media to bite. The book, again, did not sell well. And so it was back to restaurants. And then a restaurant that was supposed to be his big ticket, a place in Times Square abruptly closed. But it helped give him an idea. As he would put it, he started thinking about becoming a traitor to my profession. He wanted to pull back the curtain on how the restaurant industry really worked,

how unstable and crazy it was. After all, how many people knew the ins and outs of how their food at a restaurant actually got made and ended up on their plates? How many people knew that, for instance, the bulk of a restaurant's fish arrived on Friday mornings. So by Monday night, a customer's tuna, having sat in a fridge that was constantly being opened and closed in a stifling hot kitchen, was maybe, if not almost certainly, a little bit rancid. How many people knew that any time they ordered something well done, they were usually getting the kitchen's oldest, shittiest cut of meat? How many people knew that the best night to dine out was probably Tuesday, after the chef's Monday off, when they felt the most creatively inspired and able to cater to a non-touristy crowd. Tony was willing to bet not many.

In 1998, Tony found a job at a Parisian restaurant called Laal and kept writing on the side, and he pivoted to nonfiction. He'd written a short story that Rob Stone would describe as the Chef World version of Trainspotty, which included a thousand-word section on how Tony decided to become a chef in Provincetown. Gave his whole story how he worked in a tourist-trap lobster joint, took a job as a dishwasher, but became completely enamored of chef culture. talked about how he looked at chefs as if they were a kind of warrior class, addicted, obsessed with sex, egotistical, but supremely capable. And Rob Stone knew that that was it. That was the thing that was going to set Tony Bourdain apart.

Tony wrote in approximately 2,000-word essay about the restaurant business that he sent unsolicited then to Downtown Express, a Tribeca-based community newspaper whose editors rejected it. He then sent it to the New York Press, an alt-weekly paper in competition with the village voice. Sam Sifton was the then-press editor who received in greenlit Tony Tony's essay, but ultimately, it didn't go to print. For some reason, the editor-in-chief decided to kill it. Still, Tony kept trying, and his mom, Gladys, stepped into help. She knew a woman at the New York Times whose husband David Remnick worked for the New Yorker. In fact, David would soon become the editor-in-chief of the magazine. Gladys asked if she could send David the article,

and David's wife agreed. The article will be published on April 12, 1999, when Tony was 43, with the title of, Don't Eat Before Reading This, and it would pull back the curtain on all those nice, fancy places that New Yorkers have been seen with rose-colored glasses for years. The piece could begin with good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It's about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses of the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It's about danger, risking the dark bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first 207 well-fleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your 208 may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.

More than gross people out, Tony wanted to show that while the civilian population was sizing up chefs raiding their food, gossiping about them, it was actually a two-way street. Chefs had opinions about the people they served to, as he would write. Even more despise than the brunch people are the vegetarians. Serious cooks regard these members of the dining public and their Hespa-like splinter faction, the vegans, as enemies of everything that is good and decent in the human spirit. To live life without veal or chicken stock, fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous. In other words, food was one big cultural exchange, gross and amazing and full of criminality and extraordinary performances all at the same time.

Meanwhile, as Tony wanted to see if this piece would get published or as he waited, excuse me, he was about to broaden his view of cuisine beyond American and European varieties. In 1999, he would go to Japan to consult for the opening of the new Leol franchise in Tokyo. Got the restaurant staff there to show him around, including a fish market, and then wrote an email back to his friends in New York describing what he had seen.

Included on this email was his editor, Karen Rinaldi, who immediately contacted Tony's literary agent Kim Witherspoon and told her that Tony had to write a full nonfiction book, not just an article. The problem was he was not exactly a celebrity chef. But to Tony and those who knew him, this was exactly what made him interesting, what gave him his voice.

But to David Rosenthal, who had left Random House for Simon and Schuster, a book about working in a kitchen would not sell unless a big name was attached to it. Guy that is such a fucking common thought in just entertainment in general. Well, is there a star attached to it? No, then fuck it. This is like the laziest thinking ever. David would end up regretting his decision here a lot. Kim insisted that Tony writes his book.

In fact, Tony already had a lot of material for it in those stories he'd been telling for years, workshopping them informally amongst groups of friends as he assessed their reactions and tweaked his delivery. Kim decided they would cut just a little bit of the crass language, maybe like 5%, but leave the rest of it unadulterated since that was what made Tony's perspective so unique and valuable. The book, Kitchen Confidential, would come out in August to 2000, published by Bloomsbury, a competitor of David Rosenthal's, and he missed out on a fucking hit. The book immediately hit the bestseller list at number seven, beyond Anthony's wildest expectations. Right. Very cool. It was something special, radical, fresh,

serious but also funny, reprint rights would soon be bought by Harper Collins, which would then increase its distribution further. Apparently the book was such a hit that as one restaurateur would report, a lot of kids dropped out of universities after reading Kinsha Confidential. They turned their backs on education and become line cooks, despite how crazy and intense the job sounded. Actually, they sought the job out because of how intense and crazy it sounded. The book's success seemed to have a strange effect on Tony. If everything was material, it was selling his persona, his food, and his ideas, now he had to be on all the time. As one person who knew him put it,

he never came off the book tour. He hired a chef he'd worked with in the past, Beth Aretsky to be his assistant, but he didn't have much of a plan beyond that. What would be the next book? Or the book after that, would he ever make the transition into TV? How would he and his team put together

a kind of career that had never been seen before, something between a journalist, a chef, and an entertainer? Well, by going back to basics. Tony knew he wanted to travel all across the world, try food from all over the world and to write about it. So he pitched a new book called A Cook's Tour. In the meantime, there would be several other projects. He would write a nonfiction book called Typhoid Mary

about the notorious Irish cook, Mary Mallon, believed to have infected numerous people with Ty Ford in the early 20th century in New York. I had no idea he did all these other things. Next was a Laal cookbook, and he had a very definite idea of what it should feel like. He wanted it to be on uncoated stock paper so that the liquids in the kitchen would soak into the book getting messier with each meal the reader cooked.

But neither were the kind of big-name splashy books that Kitchen Confidential had been. Now, in fact, it was clearer than ever that people wanted to read about Tony having and sharing gritty and entertaining experiences. Or they wanted to see him have those experiences. As he geared up for the publication of a cook's tour, he ended up meeting two people who would change his life. Producers, Lydia Tanaglia and Chris Collins. Lidia and Chris had red kitchen confidential, fucking loved it, and now there were whispers

moving through the grapevine about a cook's tour. And Lydia and Chris wondered, could this be a show? At their first meeting with Tony, they followed him into the kitchen at L'Aol with their cameras, and as Lydia would later remember,

Chris and I went with these small format cameras and we ended up shooting with him in the kitchen. There was a lot of banter. It was clear he had full command of the kitchen. There was tremendous camaraderie, but he definitely kept things moving. The energy was absolutely. excellent, fast-paced, but a narrative enough for a show.

Soon, Lydia and Chris sold a cooks tour to Food Network, and after the two producers got married to one another in December of 2000, it was off to Japan. But finding a format for the show would prove easier said than done, as was getting Tony to take on the role of TV hosts. Our first location was Japan, Lydia would later say. We were set up with a fixer who had tremendous amount of well-studied protocol and etiquette and was hyper-teranical about it.

I think Tony felt awkward and weird and uncomfortable. He was avoiding me and Chris not talking to us, not looking at us. He kept us at arms-linked. Tony definitely had a wide-eyed enthusiasm for what he was doing, but he didn't know how to play that to the camera, and he seemed worried about his insecurity showing up in the show. Still, they stumbled through it shooting in Japan for two weeks after which Tony went back to New York to cook Christmas dinner for Nancy and their families.

Month later, he and his producers flew out again this time to Ho Chi Men's City, Vietnam, where the show's third episode would be filmed. That time, Tony was prepared. he always loved reading about Vietnam, especially the Vietnam War, and as soon as he got to the airport, he was ready with facts and interesting points of reference, and he shared easily these things with the camera.

Filing with, uh, or filming, excuse me, with two Sony PD100 DVD or DV camcorders. Uh, the two producers followed him around as Tony tried various foods and roadside vendors and markets, drank snake wine, even ate a still beating cobra heart. And that is not an exaggeration. Watch some fucking videos.

This is ridiculous. They cut out the heart. put it in a bowl at the table in front of you, then quickly take the rest of the cobra back into the kitchen to cook it up. That's fucking insane. This is all based in a traditional belief that drinking the snake's blood, eating fresh, literally still beating heart, makes you stronger.

And you know what? It doesn't. Definitely does not. That's the mold's too prestigious mumbo-jumbo shit. It can make you sick. Give you a dangerous parasitic or bacterial infection. Not going to make you stronger, but definitely can for sure make you weaker. Anthony did not want to insult his host, so he ate it.

no fucking chance I would do the same I am way more okay with people just not liking me and feeling insulted than I think he was my host can go fuck themselves if they need immediate raw snakeheart

to not feel insulted that's too high of a bar clearly I'm not destined for a travel show or eat local delicacies the reviews for Tony's show when it debuted in 2002 were spectacular

they loved how adventurous Anthony was how willing to do whatever the locals did he was in Variety magazine critic Paul or Phil Gallo would write for once the food network is putting on display food you can't do it home or putting on display food you can't do at home

and they show that acquiring the ingredients isn't all pretty before the meal hits the dining room table subsequent episodes would follow Tony through Cambodia Portugal Spain France Morocco St. Petersburg in Russia good on Mexico, L.A., New York, Provincetown back where I'll start in Scotland head to London before shooting for the first season wrapped up in 2001 just in time for the publication of the book version of a Cook's Tour.

As always, Tony found a way to make the book distinctive, and in his own authentic voice, it even included a running gag about reasons why you don't want to be on television, talking about the artifice of television, corporate bullshit that goes into the making of the show, the concept of selling out. Tony, now 45 years old, finally had the stability and success that had previously alluded him, but did not seem exactly thrilled about it to those who knew him best.

Those around him noticed that Tony seemed to be seriously grappling, with how his life was changing, how he was changing, now that he was becoming properly famous. In 2002, Chris and Lydia flew to St. Martin to start work on the second season of a Cook's tour. The plan was for the documentarians

to spend a few days with Nancy and Tony, right? Cool, his wife was able to travel with him before they headed out to film. However, the two producers would witness some instability. It was obvious that the entire fame and TV thing was not for Nancy. She did not like the attention, did not like the intrusiveness,

did not like that the crew, including Tony, had to be at specific places at specific times, as Nancy herself would put it later. As I watched his career develop, he seemed more at ease with giving all of himself, which, I hate to say it, gave me pause. You've got to save something. You just have to have something that's your own, and Tony didn't. Still with the order out for a second season from the Food Network, the crew made their way to New Orleans, Brazil, Sydney, Australia, Singapore,

Vietnam, amongst other cities and countries. then in 2003, the two couples traveled to Spain for what they hoped would be the first episode of season three, but the network had had enough. They didn't want to take on the high cost. After all, it was an expensive show to shoot compared to say the standard food network drivel of something like Paula Dean, showing viewers how to make fatty food

from the same soundstage, every single episode, same format, much cheaper to produce. While the Cook's tour would later become beloved, there simply was not enough viewers at the time to justify, you know, what it cost to make. it. But the crew loved the show. They loved it so much. In fact, they decided to finance the first episode of season three themselves to be like, look, it's so fucking great. You can't cancel that. But they couldn't do a full season that way, and it was back to the drawing board. And for Tony, it was back to work at Laal. And while he worked in New York Kitchen again, Chris and Lydia decided to pitch another show with him as its host, one that would eventually get the title of No Reservations, the show that would make Bourdain a household name. They brought it to the travel channel thinking it would be a slam dunk, but to their surprise, the travel channel, said no, saying they did not, quote, do food. Luckily, they would get an offer to produce a pilot from A&E, just as that channel was making a pivot

towards the docu-follow format. The network did have one request, though. They wanted the show to be New York-based. The documentaries, however, said that wasn't going to work. Back in the city, Tony and Nancy were arguing all the time, which was actually what the channel seemed to want, right? They wanted the show to show the worlds that Tony explored in Kitchen Confidentiality, the Mafia Underground, his quasi-criminal friends to show how his work was negatively

impacting his own personal relationships. This was not the show that Tony and his wife wanted to make, though, right? Good for them. I worked in reality TV less than a decade later for a few years as a producer and loved a lot of my coworkers, but in general, I fucking hate reality TV. And also despise some of my coworkers. That industry has some pretty toxic people who do not give a fuck whose lives and relationships they happily exploit and ruin if it gives them the desired ratings they need to sell shows and get renewals. So many of these shows just promote rampant dysfunction Right for a long time

The shittier the people in the shows were The more famous they would get And you know, there were some pretty shitty people Probably still are I imagine I do not pay attention To reality TV at all I haven't for many many years Too many people willing to literally do anything To whore their soul to selves out

Just to be famous Don't fucking care why Truly an industry built on making stupid people famous And on showcasing the worst of humanity And the worst moments of people's lives For higher ratings I didn't work on those kind of reality shows thank God, didn't want to, but I worked with a lot of people who did.

Good on Anthony and Nancy and Lydia and Chris for not being willing to, you know, go that low. But what were they going to do now? Just give in? No. Tony and the documentarians rightly figured that if they made this show and it stunk, nobody would give them a chance again. So it was better to wait for the right opportunity, even though this whole process of trying to sell it had already taken them over a year. Luckily, not long after their initial rejections, the travel channel came back around with a different answer. Now they did want the show.

They called in September of 2004, and by October, a contract had been signed for three initial episodes of Anthony Bourdain, no reservations. The pilot would take place in Paris and would be titled Paris, Why the French Don't Suck. In it, Anthony explored the city's famous catacombs, tried some absinth, checked out one of the city's major meat markets, spent a night in the room where Oscar Wilde died. The next episode would send him to Iceland, and there, Liddy noticed that Tony seemed to be really struggling. It was just Tony and me eating dinner, she would say. And we might have been shooting in the restaurants, and then the scene was over, everyone was gone, and it was just the two of us sitting at a table where he again kind of fell apart with tears, questioning what we were doing, what it meant. Soon after, she would get a partial explanation for what was going on. Nancy and Tony, high school sweetheart to have been together for over 30 years, had just broken up.

The travel expectations for Tony's show, the increased lack of privacy, Nancy knew it would bring into their life was a major reason, right? One of the hidden costs of fame. Their divorce would be official in 2005. Tony would soon move in to Chris and Lydia's old apartment. We'd keep working on the show, which was developing its messaging. Tony's philosophy would soon be summed up in his intro over the opening credits, I write, I travel, I eat, and I'm hungry for more. Indeed, the show's main draw would be its lack of bullshit.

No lengthy history lectures, no patronizing gushing over supposedly ancient traditions. Instead, viewers would get an hour of Bourdain making his way through various street cafes, seeking out the kind of food real modern people eat, then washing it all down with endless beers and cigarettes as he chatted with locals. But he also wanted viewers to take some important messages away, like that much of the fear around different or odd-seeming food was really just xenophobia or racism in disguise. For example, when it came to Chinese food, Bourdain would say, the way in which people dismiss whole centuries old cultures,

often older than their own and usually non-white, with just utter contempt aggravates me. People who suggest I shouldn't go to a country like China look at or, film it because some people eat dog there, I find that racist, frankly. Understand people first, their economic living situation. That same year, Brit TV exec, Pat Young, took over the travel channel, and when he got the first episode of No Reservations, he was surprised, to say the least, by his new talent's way of working. It starts off in black and white and Tony is walking down the road smoking, he'd say. I understood it to be an homage to the French new wave. Then it sort of drifted out of my

side for a few weeks until it came to the final edit. My marketing guy came to see me in a bit of a lather and he said, what did I do about this? Tony had written in an email. The new title sequence, which you promised me would be modern hip and edgy, is in fact dated, trite, and wouldn't have been edgy in 1962. I do not know the ninth circle of hell that the creators of this abomination and habit, but I feel my enthusiasm for this project draining by the pint. Best, Tony. Trying for some, I love that. Trying for some professionalism, Pat wrote back, your judgments on all the other issues with the show seem to have been okay,

so I'm going to go with you on this. But you need to understand that if this proves to be slightly slower and less impactful than we want, I reserve the right to change it. Best Pat. Tony wrote back immediately. Sir, you have a deal.

If, however, your opinion is going to be based on the output of some focus cluster fuck group, then we should all bend over now, hold on to our ankles, and pass the lube. Best Tony. I fucking love it. I love that he wrote that when he was still very famous, didn't have a lot of clout. TV execs not used to being talked to that way,

by talent still considered to be up and coming. With the team, Tony made no secret of who was in charge. He was. He wasn't about to let someone else dictate the order of the shots or how it all came together in production meetings. He explicitly would tell the crew to ignore network notes. So fucking funny to me. Again, when I worked in reality TV and I'm still good friends with a handful of producers out there making a variety of shows, the bane of a show winner's existence was network liaisons. Their notes, network notes, dreaded network notes. The network agrees to order a show from production company.

The production company hires a showrunner to film it. The showrunner typically works hand in hand with the production company's upper execs. Often the owner. Then when they're in lockstep or close to it with what they think the show should be, they send rough cuts of episodes to the network whose execs, sometimes including the president of the network

to some degree. We'll watch it, review it, send back notes. Change this, cut this, add this, etc. make it more like this show. And most of the time, the network's notes are lame as fuck. They're very fear-based decisions. They do not like risk-taking. They are much more worried about the show,

tanking ratings-wise and losing their jobs than they ever are about the show being fresh and creative and different and possibly fucking amazing and being a hit that wins awards. And because of that mentality, that very conservative mentality, they continue to reference whatever show similar to the one they're given notes on is doing best at the moment or did the best recently. and just basically tell their showrunner

to do with this other show or shows have done or are doing. Just zero originality or creativity or artistic integrity most of the time which is why you get so many shows in the reality space that are hyper-formulic and derivative and in other spaces too. The best showrunners I worked with

would go to war with execs and have the balls to tell them your notes fucking suck. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Let us creatives create, stay the fuck out of our way and you'll get a good show. and they would get away with that most of time

because the execs were at least smart enough most of time to know that the showrunner was right because showrunners who pushed back generally felt comfortable doing that because they were in fact very good at their jobs. Love that Anthony did that so early into his TV career and if he hadn't, his show would have for sure

been middle of the road, forgettable. If he would have just been the nice guy and been like, okay, no, I see your point. Let's all work as a team. Wouldn't have fucking been a magical show. Tony's a reverend. and risk-taking made it into the show's marketing. When the show's tagline,

be a traveler, not a tourist, wasn't that shocking. One of the promo, or while it wasn't, one of the promo reels did show Tony pushing various travel souvenirs, a snow globe, for example, into a wood chipper, because he thought that shit was fucking lame.

The network, despite this being insulting to most of their audience, in all likelihood, people who bought that shit, went along with it. Things seemed to be going well on the career front for Tony. Privately, though, he's still thinking that it could all disappear at any time.

You know, and it can, and he didn't want to base his life on what was just best for his TV career. So we started dating somebody, unnamed in sources, and decided he would go to live in Vietnam with her. Not exactly a great spot to be based if you're doing TV.

And his personal life, now that he was no longer married, started to get a little messy again. When Tony was in New York, his assistant, Beth Aretsky again, would get calls regularly 2 or 3 a.m. from various bars, typically Siberia, this bar.

Often she was called because Tony had lost his keys again and needed her to let him to his apartment. One time producer Lydia Technalia got a call from Tony who was somewhere on a super yacht in the Mediterranean with a bunch of Saudi royalty. Called from the boat and said, can you help me get home? I might be in over my head here. Can somebody please come get me? Or help me out? Tony's adventures,

his say yes spirit led to unique experiences that make for good stories but also burden, you know, place burden on those around him who had to help him out of these jams. Then in late 2005, when he was four, Anthony started dating Otavia Busia, an Italian woman, 22 years as junior.

She used to be a manager at a restaurant named Geisha where Eric Repair, one of Tony's old friends was the consulting chef. Coincidentally, Tony's assistant Beth would go to Geisha a lot. She only lived two blocks away

and she was more than happy to tell the staff about Tony's crazy stories. Otavia, intrigued by these stories, wanted to know more about the guy behind them, so she read Kitchen Confidential, loved it. Then when a friend set him up on a date, she found that the person behind the book

was a lot more complex than his public persona let on. In her words, on our first date, he actually told me that after his marriage ended. He was in St. Martin and he was suicidal.

He ran into a car and he was driving in the middle of the night on these really tiny roads going up a hill and he was like, you know, if I die, I don't care.

Well, based on how he dies later, I think this is an important thing to remember, right? You know, some breakups are very fucking painful and some people can, you know, handle them differently better in some ways than others.

For some it can feel, at least for a while, that life is no longer worth living. I had some of those drives myself after my divorce, you know, many years ago. The two started spending more time together with Ottavia, keeping him in the loop about the day-to-day operations of a restaurant. By this time, Tony Star had risen so high that he'd largely become disconnected from the spaces

that had made him famous, so he was always grateful to, you know, feel in touch with the scene through her. And as they got serious things started to shift for Tony. He seemed calmer, more stable. more stable. He seemed to function better, as many of us do, went in support of loving romantic relationships. By July of 2006, he was filming again this time, headed to Beirut, Lebanon for No Reservation Season 2 finale. Before that, he and Otavia had talked a little bit about getting serious. They'd spoken, you know, hypothetically, about having kids, but it didn't seem like either

of them was in a big rush to do so. And then it was off. Everyone expected this would be another episode of eating, trying new experiences, encountering the local culture, but then it turned out to be pretty fucking different. Two days after they arrived, war broke out between Israel and Hezbollah and bombs rained down from the sky, landing just a mile from Bordane's hotel. Back in New York, Travel Channel CEO,

Pat Young was having just another normal day in the office when James Ashurst, the head of communications, barged in and said, the Israelis have just shut down Lebanon. Tony is trapped in Beirut. Nobody knew what to do. The crew was stranded in the city. There was a naval blockade at first,

so they couldn't just leave by ship. They couldn't drive over the border to Israel, fearing soldiers there would shoot him first, to ask questions later. It wasn't clear if somehow they could make it into Syria, you know. Luckily, the channel had access to all sorts of high-powered

international extraction bodies and safety experts, and they chose a location for Anthony to hide while they worked on getting him out, him and his crew, this hotel, fearing that if anybody knew that an incredibly high-profile America was in the country,

something terrible could happen to them. They could be a bargaining chip or an example. In the end, Bordained his crew were evacuated by U.S. Marines to the island nation of Cyprus. truly worried he might die, the experience shook him. He was relieved to get out, but also knew he was one of the fortunate ones with mobility, that a lot of people, you know, were trapped there.

They couldn't, wouldn't make it out. They didn't have his connections. It's easy to forget that, he said at the end of the 2006 episode. And then you look at the faces and you ask what memories or things or people are they leaving behind. I used to believe that the dinner table was the great leveler, where people from opposite sides of the world could always sit down and talk and eat and drink and if not solve all the world's problems, at least fine for a time, common ground.

Now I'm not so sure. Yeah, me either, the common ground part lately. The bomb's going off a mile away also made him realize something else that he wanted to be a dad. Two weeks after he got back, Otavia was pregnant. Then in December of 2006,

Tony proposed and she said yes. Life's moving fast again in a different way. Just five months later, their daughter, Arian, Busia, Bourdain, was born on April 9, 2007, 10 days after Ariane was born They walked into City Hall Got married, no pomp in circumstance

Afterwards for the wedding meal They had hot dogs from a cart out front It was fucking hilarious to me And then it was back to shoot No reservations Besides driving him to become a father What had happened in Beirut It also made him more committed than ever

To go into places that he felt Were misunderstood and feared As Bourdain would later write I came away determined To make television differently than I had before The day's a happy horse shit The uplifting sum up at the end of every show the reflex, inclusion of a food scene in every act,

that ended right there. It was harder to balance shooting the show with a family now, and for the first few years of her life, Ottavia and Arian went with the crew pretty much everywhere they went, but after Arian started school, Otavia, and their daughter would mainly stay in New York. She never wanted to insist on Tony being at home.

She knew the livelihood of the crews depended on him being out, as well as Tony's life's purpose, but, you know, it's hard, so of course she missed him. They both, you know, her and her daughter both miss Tony. also hard for Tony's friends

to reach out to him at this time Nobody wanted to be seen as wanting to peace of him Tony felt like he couldn't even go to restaurants without risking that they'd be blown up that their specialness would go away they'd become just another place where Anthony Bourdain had once eaten

and of course there were the fans the kissing booth was what Tony called it when one person wanted a picture or a selfie or an autograph then everybody else would line up and Tony would start to panic he would often disappear

which unfortunately was frequently misinterpreted as him being rude or arrogant careless you know as if someone in the public eye has no fucking right to be naturally introverted and mostly a private person i think a lot of people actually don't understand that you can be driven to create things that people love have your career been entirely dependent on people knowing you enough people knowing you you know a decent amount and the things you create can give you a certain amount of fame but also you don't actually want to have to talk about what you've created

with everybody who loves them you know out in the public uh that's just not your temperament not your way not everybody in the public eye has a desire to be on all the time, to be the life of the party, center of attention. Doesn't mean you don't appreciate your fans. You know, you paradoxically just don't like, yeah, having all eyes on you. It's an unfortunate byproduct of your creative passions. Tony was at least increasingly feeling much happier, at least seemingly so while shooting in far-fung places where nobody knew him.

But that didn't mean life was perfect there either. Some of his bad habits in the show's travel and filming schedule were catching up to him, A season three episode would send in to Brazil As producer Morgan Fallon would later remember The fucking smoking man And the exhaustion and the travel Really racked up a hefty line of credit over the years There were times when we'd be out on a hike

On a shoot and I'd be like Who has the defibrillator? Because I would have Tony on Mike And I could hear him wheezing I could hear him coughing Nari Kai, another producer Would remember a shoot in South Korea Where Bordane attempted some taekwondo

She said Tony then was probably the most non-athletic person I'd ever met my entire life. He was still smoking a pack of Marlboro Reds, and he would never exercise. He was rail thin. He wasn't overweight, so he didn't look unhealthy, but he was so out of shape, uncoordinated, out of breath, not flexible. And he wasn't really doing taekwondo, but we were at least trying to make this funny montage of him kick my ass, and then another little girl kicking his ass. So we were trying to get him to kick, and Tony, not even joking, couldn't get his foot past his knees. It was just comical how out of shape he was. Soon after that, Tony, now 50 years. Soon after that, Tony,

now 50 years old, understandably embarrassed, started going to the gym, trying to get healthy for the show, and for his wife and daughter, his wife, Octavia, she'd actually recently gotten into MMA, specifically Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and was getting pretty good at it, which I'm sure helped motivate him.

He also quit smoking for a while. Years later, Jiu-Jitsu would become a core part of his personality, according to some, there were years when it was all he could talk about. Long-time producer Morgan Fallon again would say he was a lifelong addict, man. If it wasn't heroin, it was work. If it wasn't work, it was Jiu-Jitsu. If it wasn't Jiu-Jitsu, it was relationships or any number of other things.

The Jiu-Jitsu was good because largely it was a positive addiction, and so as much as it was fucking insufferable to sit there and listen to him talk about something that I knew nothing about over and over and over again. I wasn't worried about him. I wasn't worried that he was going to collapse or have a heart attack or die of emphysema. When he wasn't working out with his family, he was filming. In 2008, the first episode of Season 4 would send him back to Singapore where he declared, if you love food, this might be the best place on Earth.

In the episode, Bordane sampled bone soup, a bloody bath of broken mutton limbs that Bordane greedily sucked the marrow out of from a straw. Fuck that! Oh, I don't know if I could do it. Most exotic food I ever tried to eat, actually on camera while shooting a little sizzle reel, presentation reel for some producers in L.A. that were trying to sell up a travel channel discovery channel style show about a comic willing to try anything in some attempt to win bets against random people on the street.

I can't remember the name right now. But it was Balut, Fertilized Duck Egg. A street food in the Philippines. So fucking upsetting. A boiled, developed embryo eaten out of the shell. I feel like mine might have been spoiled. Or maybe they're all that way.

The visual is rough. It's a fucking fetus. You know, you're looking at little eyeballs and beak and stuff. I gagged so hard trying to take a bite. And then once I took a bite and started to chew it, I just, I lost it. I vomited all over the place.

Could not do it. My body, like, strongly rejected it like it's never rejected a type of food before. But you can watch videos of people calmly enjoying it like it's nothing. I do not understand how. Tony also ate regular day-to-day meals like chicken rice. At one point, he also went for some very fancy stuff at a place called Orum, a stuffy, bizarre restaurant, tricked out with sterile operating tables where guests sat in gold-plated wheelchairs.

Okay. The food was tiny compressed units of foam-covered so-called molecular gastronomy. They would get a dose of Bordane's brutal honesty. He didn't care for it, though he did say that he felt guilty sneering at the place because of the talented chefs. By the episode's end, Bourdain will be back in more familiar territory, sit in another unremarkable food court, eagerly dining on sharks' head and a mess of gigantic chili crabs, whose size, he said, could be partially attributed to their constant diet of human corpses floating down the Genghis River. Fucking no. Guessing those crabs must have been imported from India or Bangladesh. Did you know it's estimated that thousands of human corpses are intentionally dumped into that river every year?

some partially cremated others not at all due to holy traditions and families not being able to afford a proper burial Oh yeah They just sneak me mom peepa Down to the riverbank Push them out wave goodbye Love you

You're somebody else's problem now Full traditional Hindu cremations With wood pires are very expensive Some families who can afford Enough firewood to perform a full fucking cremation Will attempt a partial cremation And then just call it a day Just kind of fucking singe

Grandma out of a fucking equivalent of a sheet of plywood, I guess. Or they'll wrap the body in cloth, not burn it at all, and just release it into the water. Also, certain Hindu traditions allow for uncremated water burials for specific groups, including young children, unwed girls, holy aesthetics,

individuals who have died from specific causes like snake bites or infectious diseases. Cool, just put the diseased bodies right in the water, as is. And why put them in the water? Many Hindus view the Genghis as a sacred living goddess and dying along its banks or having remains enter the river

is believed to help free the soul from the cycle of rebirth. Fucking ancient ritual religious rituals. Way too often. Just a problem for the modern world. Just a problem. Just nothing good about them. An estimated 200,000 people now die each year in India due to

the consumption of contaminated drinking water. And you know what really contaminates drinking water? Fucking dead bodies. Thanks, corpses. Thanks for turning a beautiful river into a dystopian death pool. In the late 1980s, the Indian government spent approximately $32 million launching 25,000 specially bred flesh-eating turtles into the Genghis River specifically to consume decompusing, decomposing, decomposing, and decomposing, I'll have you know, human corpses.

Are those corpses decompusing? Oh, my God. Well, they'll be decomposing soon. Tony's corpse reference sent me into a river horror side quest death spiral that I first thought it had to be nonsense because it's too ridiculous. Oh, no. So many corpses in that river that the government actually did send thousands and thousands of flesh-eating turtles into the water to try and eat the delicious corpse meat, corpse meat, which didn't work, by the way. In that same episode, Bourdain then shared some laughs in a beer with some grizzled men who advised him on the secret to a long and happy life. Lots of alcohol, plenty of pork, and no exercise. Okay. While wondering allow what makes Singapore so special, he wrapped up the episode by saying, I'm still no closer to an answer, but who cares when the food is this good? Another episode from the four season would send him to New Orleans, where he explored the effects of Hurricane Katrina on locals and the food industry as a whole.

There were also episodes that were more about Tony, like season fours, Into the Fire, New York, in which Tony and his friend Eric Repair spent an eye to his line cooks at Tony's old restaurants, to lay all to see if they still had the skills necessary to work in a restaurant. And they did. Anthony now felt his real work, though, was shining a light on places where more people paid attention to the place's violence, reputation or its position in global events rather than the cultural and lifestyles of its people. In 2010, he returned to Beirut to try to grapple with the incompetence or incompleteness, excuse me, of his first visit. That year, he also went to Haiti shortly after a massive earthquake, giving viewers a front row seat to the destruction that a seven-magnitude earthquake had caused.

This all made for great TV, but it was also diverging more and more from what the travel channel felt that it wanted as a brand. increasingly the show was focusing on atmosphere and texture, capturing a place at a particular moment, not necessarily an itinerary that other travelers could replicate. As one producer would remember, we got some pretty hilarious notes like, are there any parts of Haiti that are touristy? The network also wanted a traditional little sum-up at the end.

Tony, very passionately and eloquently, argued that the entire point of the show was that there was no answer to a lot of the questions being asked. There was no neat, tidy sum up to the situation in Haiti or the situation in a lot of places, but execs did not like that inconvenient truth. Meanwhile, Tony was still writing books like Medium Raw,

a bloody Valentine to the world of food and the people who cook, published by Echo and imprint of Harper Collins in 2010. In it, Bourdain took aim at his fellow TV chefs, most of whom he argued were not chefs at all. They had never even worked in a restaurant. This book, unlike his previous works, would get mixed reviews.

Some would say that he was now out of touch with a scene that had created him. Others praised his brutal honesty and willingness to consider himself part of the problem. Indeed in that book, he described himself as a loud, egotistical, one-note asshole who's been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious over-testosterone book for way too long. As Tony somewhat predicted, medium raw did not sell quite as well as Kitchen Confidential. Still, in 2011, Tony established Anthony Bourdain books, a publishing imprint with Echo.

He brought in comedian Bonnie McFarlane, along with Roy, oh my gosh, Roy Choi and Jose Andres to write books. Bonnie is great. I don't know the other two. Bonnie's great. Random deep cut personal trivia. Many, many years ago, her and I shared the same audience for our televised tapings

of our Comedy Central Presents, half our specials, and she was lovely. Fucking hilarious. Still is. Describing his new line of books, Anthony said, there will be a line of books

for people with strong voices who are good at something, who speak with authority, discern nothing from this initial list other than a general affection for people who cook food and like food. The ability to kick people,

in the head is just as compelling to us, as long as that's coupled with an ability to vividly describe the experience. In July of 2011, despite some internal frustrations with him, but because ratings were good, the travel channel announced adding a second one-hour, 10-episode Bourdain show to be titled The Layover, which would premiere November 21st, 2011. Each episode featured an exploration of a city

that could be undertaken within a long-air travel layover of 24 to 48 hours. The series would run for 20 episodes through February of 2013, and Bourdain would later remember the experience as grueling. He wrote, I went out and shot 10 episodes of the layover, pretty much back to back in the space of a month. That was really, really, really tough on me. People loved that show,

but it was an absolute misery to make. Bordane also executive produced a similar show hosted by celebrities that was called The Getaway, which lasted two seasons on Esquire Network. Remember that channel? They shut down in 2017. I remember pitching them some shows and a few of my comedy buddies hosted some shows

with them. He was also working on something else around this time. Dude was so busy. He was working on a fictional TV show. You might have heard of it. Tramey. Holy shit, I love that series. Both Lindsay and I do. It was what helped us fall in love with the city of New Orleans. Just a fucking excellent show. David Simon, his co-creator, the guy who also created one of the best TV shows of all time, The Wire, right out there with Breaking Bad for me, would work with Bourdain to develop the show's restaurant tour protagonists. Because the show's all about just a life in New Orleans after Katrina. And the shows, I'd say like one of its protagonists, Jeanette, played by Kim Dickens, phenomenal in that role, phenomenal in general, huge fan. According to Lolis, Eric Eli,

a writer for the show, and a New Orleans native, Tony would tend to fly into the writer's room in New Orleans for a day. He would solve 75 to 100% of the problem of what's going on or what's going to happen to her. Because he knew how restaurants worked, right, how gritty chefs obsessed with creating something truly special behave, what drives them. In May of 2,000, 12, Bourdain surprised a lot of people when he announced that he was leaving the travel channel. Why? Well, it's not a bad, I mean, pretty good reason. I do see the exec's point here.

He wanted to take things further and do something very fucking extreme. He wanted to eat, like actually eat, a roasted human baby, which are still considered a delicacy in remote rural parts of Albania. There are villages in the northwest Balkan Mountains of this nation, what the fuck, near the border of Montenegro, where for hundreds of years in secrets, obviously small children in the age of three, if they should die for any reason, but there's also rumors that some perfectly healthy babies are, quote, harvested for this apparent culinary delight.

They are roasted in traditional wood-fired clay ovens whole in the middle of the night, and then most of the baby is quickly eaten. The ribs, I guess, are most prized. Jesus. The lightly seasoned baby meat served with some root vegetables like parsley,

radishes, potatoes, all of which covered in a thin baby gravy. Apparently it's the fucking best thing you'll ever have in your life. If you get the chance to eat it, the meat is very, very tender and juicy, full of natural flavors because of how long babies are breastfed there. If your palate is strong enough, I guess you can taste notes of the baby's mother's breast milk. I mean, I would try it. I would try that. I would for sure try it.

I know it's sad. But it also, is it fucking weird to say it sounds delicious? I mean, listen, I thought a lot about this. If you view this the right way, I think it's kind of noble. I mean, not eating a baby isn't going to bring the baby back alive, is it? I mean, at least this way, you know, baby, baby, baby wasn't wasted. Do you remember when chilies used to serve babies? I want my new baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back.

Your favorite baby back ribs just got even better. Slow smoked in-house for hours over pecan wood chips to create a sweeter smoky flavor That was absurd. Tony did not want to eat a baby. Neither did the people of Albania, to my knowledge, or the folks at Chili's. The following December, Tony explained on his blog that his departure was due to his frustration

with the channel's new ownership, using his voice and image to make it seem as if he were endorsing like a car brand, he wasn't, as well as the channel's decision to create three special episodes solely have already seen clips from the show. He didn't like his name and likeness being assigned to money grabs

that he had nothing to do with. Luckily for him, due to him, having become a household name, somebody else was interested. I'm sure multiple somebodies were. One of them, the one that would get his next show was CNN. For CNN, he would create parts unknown. While no reservations featured a more lighthearted, you know, a little bit younger, comedic Bourdain, parts unknown.

He's a little older, more cinematic, artsy, politically engaged. He's more of a serious guy. The show would premiere April 14th, 2013. More on it in just a tiny bit. First, let's look at some of his other ventures from around this period. between 2012 and 2017, Bourdain served as narrator and executive producer for several episodes of the award-winning PBS series

The Mind of a Chef. It would air during the last months of each of those years. At the same time, between 2013 and 2015, a judge and mentor in the ABC cooking competition show The Taste, which earned Emmy nominations for each season. In the season two premiere of Parts Unknown, Bourdain made his most daring trips yet, went to Jerusalem, the West Bank, and to Gaza.

he would try to make sense of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through conversations with Israeli British chef Yotam, Otelengi, theater director, Abed, Abusrur, and cookbook author Leila El Hadat. He would try Fatit Ajir. This dish made a baby watermelon, not babies, baby watermelons, and unleavened bread,

and Makubla, a traditional Palestinian dish made of layers of fried eggplant. In the West Bank, he would also meet bedelmen. Saadeh and Mona Inab, the first all-female racing team in the Middle East. And from the get-go, Bourdain knew that expressing sympathy with and belief in either the Palestinian cause or the Israeli cause, the more things change, the more they stay the same, would get him some flack. He opened the episode with the prediction that, by the end of this hour,

I will be seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer, a Zionist tool, a self-hating Jew, an apologist for American imperialism, an Orientalist, a socialist, a socialist, a fascist, a CIA agent, and worse. But he emphasized that above all, he wanted to argue against any devotion to religious principles that called for others to be harmed. I am instinctively hostile to any kind of devotion,

he said, certainty is my enemy, I'm all about doubt, question oneself, and the nature of reality constantly. Holy fuck, I love that sentiment so much. I've never worded it that way, but when it comes to matters of faith,

all matters of all faiths, I am also instinctively hostile to any kind of devourable. motion and certainty. Right? I also think that certainty is the enemy in so many different realms. I mean, if we're talking about math,

then no. 2 plus 2 is always 4. Doubt in that realm just makes you ignorant or stupid or both. In areas of proven science where the same equations or experiments or principles year after year or found to be exactly the same,

anything but certainty is just foolishness. No one thinks the earth is flat because that's a real possibility. Everyone who thinks the earth is flat is, again, ignorant or stupid or both. Vaccines work, right? to argue against that is fucking idiocy.

They save lives. Fact. Chemtrails. Not real. Lips. Not controlling the weather. That shit, not up for serious debate by serious people, by people who should be respected and taken seriously. Faith is always up for debate. You are 100% certain that you know God's will get the fuck out of here. Much of Bordane, season two premiere of Parts Unknown, was spent pushing back against anybody who viewed Palestinians or Muslims as naturally aggressive or hostile, saying many, if not

most of these guys are not too sympathetic to my country or my ethnicity, I'm guessing. But there's that hospitality thing. Anywhere you go in the Muslim world, it seems, no matter what, you feed your guests and you do your best to make them feel at home. And he made it clear that if there were predisposed or if, you know, they were, excuse me, predisposed to violence, that was a natural result of the crowded conditions and refugee camps, which he visited. He would say, 6,000 people of that number, 66% are under the age of 18.

I don't care where that is in the world. That is pretty much a recipe for unruly behavior. Yeah, exactly. I wonder what he would think of the situation in the Middle East right now, right? It's so heartbreaking. Netanyahu, fuck that guy. He should be executed for war crimes.

Seriously, fighting terrorists, no excuse for continually destroying civilian infrastructure that leads directly to the mass deaths of so many children. More than 64,000 children have been reported killed or seriously injured since October of 2023 and a response that people chanting free, Palestine continually punished around the world.

Punished for being what? Moral and decent. Being against innocent children not dying in reckless missile strikes and other atrocities should never be seen as a political opinion. Being against a government that happens to be Jewish should never be viewed as being anti-Semitic. So much fucking gas-liding and just ignorant propaganda being tossed around his spun. I'm sure if Bourdain was here today, he'd be sharing a lot of strong opinions on a lot

of this, and I bet I would agree with him. Vivian Sansour, a journalist. he worked with over there would remember how he did not pressure anyone he meant to explain or defend their humanity. She said, a man a few words. He embodied what it means to just be there and be witness to someone's painful experience without trying to provide trivial sympathies or sprinkle salt on wounds still open. In preparation for his visit, she had run around for days trying to find the perfect ingredient she thought the legendary chef would be most interested and impressed by. She was shocked and grateful to find that he didn't care about how genuine or authentic a certain recipe was.

was genuine to him if it was made in the refugee camps where the people who lived there, you know, ate it, which is what happened. He made that stuff there. And it changed lives. One woman named Islam that he visited had run a cooking school in the camp to provide for her child. After the episode aired, Islam started receiving requests for cooking classes. Within a few months, visitors came from around the world to the camp to learn from her, and she in turn learned English. And all of this allowed her to expand her kitchen into a cooking school that helped children with special needs. as Islam would later say That day opened my life up to possibilities

I could have never imagined Our kids are getting the education and attention they need And we are overbooked all the time In 2015, Bourdain appeared as himself In the 2015 film The Big Short In which he used seafood stew as an analogy For a collateralized debt obligation

I'd show the clip But unless you're kind of familiar with financial systems It's kind of lost That year he also produced And starred in a Wasted the Story of Food Waste He was a busy, busy bee. He also found time for some of his hobbies in August of 2015. Earned a blue belt in juditsu.

We'd go on to win gold at the IBJF International Brazilian Jiu-Ditzu Federation's New York Spring International Open Championships in, yeah, 2016. Love that he started training in juditsu. By the way, just in 2014 at the age of 58. Also in 2016, had a sit-down conversation with President Barack Obama. Obama featured on the program in an episode of Parts Unknown that aired in September of 2016. The two would talk over a beer and a buncha at a small restaurant in Hanoi, Vietnam. True to Bourdain's unorthodox style, Obama would not appear until 30 minutes into the program after Bordane had dined with several ordinary Vietnamese people. As they ate, the two talked about Indonesian street food, U.S. politics, the history of the Vietnam War, Obama's time spent in Jakarta as a boy, and this conversation was truly groundbreaking.

At one point, Obama made a casual reference to the fact that the CIA had played a role in the 1965 coup that, over through the Indonesian government, leading to widespread violence. That historical fact was common knowledge, but no U.S. president had publicly admitted it to be true. It would actually have to be edited out, and then the U.S. government later would go on to declassified documents showing U.S. involvement in the coup in 2017. The segment culminated with Bourdain asking in the obvious context of Trump's campaign, as the father of a young girl, is it going to be okay? Obama replied, excuse me, progress is not a straight line. There are going to be moments in any given part of the world where things are terrible.

But having said all that, I think things are going to work out. Eh. Time will tell on the working out part here. I'm still hopeful, too, that things will improve. I hope they don't have to get too much worse before they do. Which I could fucking destroy both the GOP and the Democratic Party. One are fucking monsters right now and the other are just fucking weak as fuck. I would just love to see better parties rise up from their ashes. Speaking of Bordane's daughter, all of this work was, of course, due to the travel and long production hours, it all entailed, you know, hard on family life. Tony was away for, according to some estimates, over 200 days a year. When he was home, he was a wonderful dad, though, loved to cook

for Arian, and she would later describe it. I always cook with him. We would cook Rattatatoui from the movie Rattatooie, and we made it exactly like they made it. We'd cook schnitzel, he'd make little stations. One of them has the breading. One has the flour. One has the eggs. My dad put it in the pan. He'd cook omelets for me all the time. I'd help him flip it. He'd let me sprinkle chocolate chips or blueberries into pancakes. Then he'd let me flip the pancake a little. We had this little thing called The Weirdo Club. We don't really know what it was about. It was just us being weird, and I really liked it. He encouraged weirdness. He pretty much encouraged every single thing I wanted to do in my life and gave me the information to back it up. And that is truly beautiful.

the family spent a month each summer in the Hamptons and there Tony would encourage Arian to pursue whatever she wanted drawing, singing, playing bass guitar, etc. He'd let Arian watch shows like Archer played Grand Theft Auto I played with her But then Tony and his wife, Otevia,

they separated in 2016 And the separation unfortunately A bit a long time coming Both of them knew that their decision to have a kid and to get married was impulsive It wasn't something they had properly thought through They hadn't adjusted their lifestyles beforehand to accommodate it all

and for a while they soldiered on out of a sense of duty but Ariane as she got older you know Ottavia she started to resent Tony for always getting to be the cool dad well she had to do all the nuts and bolts things you know run the household on a daily basis and be the enforcer and they both know that they work better as parents

than romantic partners which sort of worked for a while but then Tony got a girlfriend and she wanted him to move out and he did both agreed that he would still take his daughter to school still make dinner and sleep over but of course that plan didn't work for long. Without the stability of a marriage, Tony did not have a routine grounding him

and keeping him away from his tendencies to overwork and overindulge in his vices. He began working harder than ever, right? Losing himself in work. He's fucking depressed, I'm sure. As producing partner Lydia Tenoglia would remember over the years, Tony's demeanor shifted.

He went from, I can't believe my luck, getting out of hot kitchens to do this. And you see almost a vibrating crazy energy. But then that energy would fade and he just seemed tired. And of course he did. The fucking burnout is real.

It doesn't matter how much you love something. If that something is just continually keeping you from getting the proper amount of sleep or leaving you the proper amount of time in your life for just rest and relationships with friends and family, you know, if you fucking love apple pie, you're like, oh, my God, if I could just, you know, get to eat apple pie every day, that would be a dream come true. If I could get paid for eating apple pie? But then what if you had to eat fucking four pies a day every day for fucking 20 years? Right?

Eventually you're going to be like, fuck pies, no more! and Tony, you know, he's not a young guy grinding at this point. He's 59 years old. And then in 2016, when he was 60, he published a cookbook, appetites. But he didn't seem to have the same gusto for promoting it he once had with earlier books. Right? Again, of course not. He's fucking tired.

Some thought the divorce was taking his toll. Other thoughts of the constant international flights were messing with his sleep. And in turn, messing with everything else, like his health. He looked unhappy. He was thin, too thin, worn out. When it came time to renew the contract for the show, everybody thought they were probably I knew one more year and call it quits, but Tony pushed for three. He just couldn't help himself.

He was also dating again. He'd met like seriously dating. He'd met an Italian actress named Azaa Argento in April of 2016 while filming the Rome episode of Parts Unknown. Not 100% clear if she was the girlfriend that wanted him to move out or not when he was still married to Ottavia, but maybe. Not everybody thought his new romantic relationship was a good thing for Tony. They felt he had too much on his plate, too much going on. He was too exhausted to also be pursuing. an international romance on top of everything else.

Tony, in his exhaustion, came down with the case of shingles, actually ended up passing out on the street. Soon after, Aosia canceled a trip to Paris they were supposed to take in July 2016, leaving Tony devastated, but also more intent than ever. I'm pursuing this, you know, very committed relationship with her. He wanted to be very committed. I should add, the relationship was open, but someone in his circle did not think Tony wanted it to be at all.

Kim Witherspoon, his agent would recall, once he became involved with Asia, many of us were voicing our worry directly about that relationship. And while he was engaged by it, I never felt that he shut me down when I was conveying the concerns. He thought the positives outweighed the negatives. A friend who saw him in August of 2016, we remember Tony was absolutely head over heels crazy about Asia. Even more so, whenever she seemed unavailable. Some of his friends likened it to his previous addictions, chasing the high of heroin, high of a new job. Now he was addicted to chasing her.

and when the high didn't come, whenever she did not reciprocate what he wanted or expected. He got very down, very dark. Started replying to emails with single words, which was not like him. Stop replying entirely. Chris Bourdain, his brother later shared his thoughts

and concerns about the relationship, saying in the last couple of years, we all knew him well enough to know that, okay, you're in that intense burning phase of your love obsession at this moment, so should I not expect to see you very much? Because every spare minute that you have, you're spending with this woman.

But I would have liked it if you would have shot me email here and there. Also, there were concerns over how Anthony was blending work and romance. Osia was taking center stage in parts unknown. She would direct a 2017 episode in Puglia, Italy, and almost everything went wrong when the Italian equivalent of the FBI showed up, because as it turned out, the fixers had not brokered the right means of permission with the Italian government, and the crew had to cancel the whole thing as 50 guests simultaneously converged on the set. But uncharacteristically, Tony didn't seem to care. He thought the chaos was fucking hilarious.

Then, in October of 2017, Argento said in an article in The New Yorker that she had once been sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein in the 90s. That fucking pig. He actually looks like a fucking pig. I hate that he's still alive. That gross fuck. Thankfully, his health is terrible, and he seems to really be suffering in prison where he should die, despite his constant shady legal maneuvering. Maybe somebody would be kind enough to shove a large stick up his ass and fucking perforate his colon and he can hemorrhj out or something. imagine being that despicable serial rapist fuck's attorney, working long hours to try and get that cancerous turd back on the street, free to rape again. What a fun job.

After being criticized for her account in the notoriously misogynistic Italian media and politics, Argento moved to Germany to escape, which he describes as a culture of victim blaming in Italy. Then Argento delivered a speech on May 20th, 2018, following the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, calling the festival Weinstein's hunting ground. and alleging she was raped by Weinstein in cans when she was 21. And then she added,

and even tonight sitting among you, there are those who still have to be held accountable for your conduct against women. Uncomfortable and I'm sure earned. There really are so many fucking sleazebacks in the upper echelons of Hollywood. In every echelon. So many stories floating around the industry,

crazy how many accounts you can find online of major actresses talking about how they were either sexually harassed or both harassed and assaulted earlier in their careers, enough to make you wonder how many other. actresses and women in general who've never been given a platform due to a lack of fame also have horrible stories about being raped by dirtbag producers. There's just so many fucking dudes from living out there and being in that who just like they were fucking nerds in high school or whatever.

Nobody wanted to fuck them. And they just now have this massive chip on their shoulder about that, this insecurity you could see from space and somehow rationalize it. It's okay to do a little tit for tat of all help you out with your career because I don't know, I got some fucking family money and I'm a producer if you fuck me. Just fucking gross piles of shit. Do you ever think about how many terrible people out there are out there in the world to the extent

that when you hear shit like warnings of an impending AI apocalypse, one of your first thoughts is, that's probably good. It's probably a good thing. Probably for the best if robots would just wipe us out. Just me. Bordane would get personally involved with the Me Too movement in 2017, his close friend, not just with his girlfriend.

His close friend Josh Hami, front man for Queens of the Stone Age. one of my favorite bands of all time, truly. He was playing a show where things got out of control. As Josh would put it, I was kicking the lights off the stage. I even cut myself, I was bleeding up there. This camera comes on stage, and it's dark because I'd kick the lights off. And so I just brush it with my foot, and I smile.

I wasn't trying to hurt anybody. You know, it's like, if you've ever seen that shot of Johnny Cash, giving the finger, or Iggy walking on the crowd. If you ask rock photographers, Bob Gruen or Mick Rock, if they've ever been bumped around to get a shot, that's part of it for rock and roll. That's it, right? I thought I was given this person the shot of the night, really,

but I looked and I remember thinking, oh, she looks insulted. Well, the photographer in question finished photographing the rest of the night, then later alleged that, you know, Josh intentionally kicked her in the head out of malice. He tried to apologize via email. She would not accept it, and her story got woven, you know, folded into the Me Too movement. And then something weird happened. As Josh said, everyone else called to see if I was okay, but I get a text from Tony. He was very rough with me.

He says, you need to do a full mea culpa. Apologize. people will come after you, they're going to tear you apart. They're going to tear apart the associations you have with me and our friends. You can't say you were tired or that you were drunk. You can't explain anything. Just fully throw yourself at the mercy of this. Josh was shocked.

He was even more shocked when Tony came after him on Twitter, despite Tony never asking for his side of the story, never calling him to talk. Then on December 12, 2017, news broke on the restaurant industry website, Eater. And then in the New York Times and Washington Post about numerous women's allegations of sexual harassment by celebrity chefs, Mario Batali. and Ken Friedman in the workplace. Tony, who had once considered Batali and Friedman friends and peers, became a vocal supporter of the Me Too movement and was made aware in advance

that the stories were in development and, again, did not give his friends a heads up, did not reach out to them, and just threw his full support behind the allegations. And I'm not saying the allegation is not true, but to all of Tony's friends, who knew how Leary he had always been about mob mentality,

it just felt off. It just didn't feel like him to not, you know, get the other side of the story. soon the incident with Josh had spiraled out to all of their mutual friends who all thought Tony was in the wrong, at least about Josh, maybe not the other guys. Those guys actually are pieces of shit from what I've read. But Tony couldn't admit that he had been wrong and he closed himself off. Soon it seemed to his few remaining friends, like he'd no longer had his own identity.

He would frequently say, Asia thinks this or Asia thinks that when I asked for his opinion. His friends assumed he had gone so hard on Josh and others because of Osia and what had happened to her. By the end of 2017, things are reached a boiling point for many of Tony's friends, family and co-workers regarding his relationship with Aosia, how toxic it seemed to be for him. His agent Kim Witherspoon arranged for Chris and Lydia, his longtime executive producers, his producing partners to hold a kind of intervention about his relationship and about the direction of the show because he was ceding more control creatively to Argenio about that too. And that meeting did not go well. And the next time they met at an Irish bar, Tony told them that it would be best if everybody went their separate. ways. He essentially fired them. He just continued to choose Osseo all the time at the expense of friends, family, and co-workers. God, I fucking, all that shit reminds me of somebody I know, a former friend of

mine, who's fucking crazy. I will not share any names at all, but they were, you know, concerned because a lot of their friends had cut out, cut them out of their lives because of this person's relationship with somebody. And this person had a lunch with, you know, Lindsay and I and wanted to remain friends, but wanted us to accept this new person that they were seen as a friend as well and we just refused because we felt that they were very toxic and I just thought it was crazy

and to this day thing is crazy that they chose this person and hopefully they are happy. I don't know. Hopefully they're happy now because they risked a lot and gave up a lot to get there. A lot of their friends fucking backed away from him

there was some family problems with it. It's wild. But I love, you know what? Love is just fucking crazy, right? It's so emotional and I guess in past relationships I've made some terrible decisions too years ago. but Tony launched into an insulting explanation,

listing out the ways his team had not matched up to his standards when they confronted him about Aosia, how he was going to move to Italy with her so people would leave him alone, so he's really isolating himself and just ending up with just her in his circle. Chris and Lydia totally shocked. They didn't know what the fuck was going on.

They'd worked so well with him for so long. They'd come up with him. Now I felt like they didn't even know him anymore. The feeling they had no other choice, feeling insulted, they agreed to end the working relationship, which pretty much ended their, entire relationship. Shortly before the Hong Kong episode, a parts unknown aired on CNN, June 3rd, 2018. Tony would publish an essay in the Hollywood reporter about how he was obsessed with the work

of highly regarded director of photography, Christopher Doyle. And this again will work its way back to Argenta. This guy was a man famous for, is famous, still, for largely, largely for his work in Hong Kong art house movies. Doyle ultimately agreed to work with Tony. We should have been a big boon to production. Unfortunately, there was another disaster. The director, Michael Steed, had to have his gallbladder removed, which meant he had to be replaced, and Tony suggested Oscephil in. Well, didn't suggest that, demanded it. When Tony found out that, you know, she wasn't the production's first choice, he blew a fuse. Many had never heard him that angry before, and the production would be a disaster.

As producer Jared Addukanis would later remember, quote, Tony was in the booth and just rips through his lines like he always does, just blast through four pages of narration, does the whole thing like 15 minutes, comes out of the VO, the voiceover. booth and is bouncing around and asks her, hey, what do you think? And she was like, that's what you fucking complain about all the time? She's like, snotty. And I've seen her in interviews, and I've got to say, not a fan. She comes across as wildly unlikable.

Another producer described her as Yoko Ono in a Beatles recording session. Indeed, when another producer disagreed with her, she told Tony, it's either me or him. Jesus Christ, Tony again chose his girlfriend. Fired a fucking guy he'd been working with for a dozen years. now everybody's getting nervous. If they cross Asia, right, are they going to be gone? Probably. As producer Morgan Fallon, long-time collaborator would put it, I did not want to be on a show with Osia.

I especially did not want to direct a show with her involved because I knew it was basically her show. Tony had so empowered her that even shows that she wasn't involved in. I was getting notes from her, right? This is wild-tham professional, but it does happen a lot. The last few episodes of Parts Unknown that Tony shot in the spring of 2018 included Indonesia, West Texas, Spain, and Italy. The final new episode to air on CNN was Lower East Side, which used an experimental style to take a clear-eyed look at a fast-changing downtown Manhattan neighborhood.

Then in the summer of 2018, something seemed to have shifted again with Tony. He started to act like his old self again. He was kinder, more approachably, reached out to his friend Josh Hami. He apologized. Other friends, remember that he was excited about various things with his daughter, right?

What she was up to, talking about how excited he was to bring her to shoots. Friends, family, co-workers started to grow hopeful that the Anthony they had known was back. Then in the first week of June 2018, Tony's crew, along with his old friend, Eric prepare, go to Alsace's France to shoot an episode of parts unknown. The trip began with a fairly benign scene of eating pot-a-fah with Eric next day. They ride through wine country on tandem bikes. But then at some point during the bike shoot, Tony gets upset. His mood shifted very suddenly, and he wanted to go back to the hotel and eat.

Right? People are wondering, is he is hungry? Something going on. Next day is much the same. His spirits are down. They eat at a five-star. restaurant, a man by a quirky grandma who fed bread to geese every day, then went to go get massages. Tony seemed to be in an especially dark mood. In a film conversation with Eric, he started talking about death, about choking to death on

hot dogs randomly. He then goes inside to talk on the phone with ASEA. Everyone's confused. They are less confused when they soon see some news that he had already got. The Italian tabloid key had published a series of romantically suggestive paparazzi photos of Asia. sensually dancing with the French journalist Hugo Claimon in Rome. Pretty handsome dude also, by the way,

and over 30 years younger than Anthony. Then the U.S. tabloid National Enquirer informed Tony that had also intended to publish the same photographs and asked for comment. And now Tony's fucking live it. This is the woman he had fired longtime collaborators for, some of his best friends, the woman he had lost deep friendships over, or had them very damaged.

The woman who, you know, he chose to the extent he became estranged with family members over, the woman he had gone to bat for hard during the Me Too movement. Now it seemed like she didn't give a shit about him, like she was just off to her next fling. Kim Witherspoon, Tony's agent, called him to check on him, but he didn't pick up. A little while later, he texted her that he was okay, but it was a short text. Then he goes up to his room to Sulk. The next day, Friday, June 8th, 2018, everybody's getting ready for another shoot, but then Tony doesn't come down for breakfast.

Worried, his friend Eric goes upstairs to his room to check on him as Todd Liebler, another producer he worked with later remember it. Friday morning we were expecting Tony on set We prepared the area We're waiting And finally I just got up and started shooting B-roll You know just getting like a background shots Establishing shots and stuff

Stuff you can put voice over over And I'm just double checking Where we set up all the flags And stuff for the lights And then I get this massive punch in my shoulder And I turn around And Mike Steed is already walking away But gesturing for me to follow him

Then he turned to me and said Tony hung himself Todd didn't know what that meant Was Tony dead? Was he in the hospital with the fuck is going on. He was dead. He had hanged himself the night before. His body bore no other signs of violence and to corners, corners his suicide appeared to have been a tragic and impulsive final act of self-harm. So what had set him off? Well, I'm sure you have a guess, you know, as I did,

text records would show that Asia had ended their relationship with him the night before. Around the time he killed himself, obviously shortly before, many would lead, that would lead many to think that he had died basically due to a foolish decision made in the recent way. of a broken heart. And I do think that was probably most of it, right? He was so obsessed with her in such an unhealthy way. He had done something really, really stupid and selfish in a highly emotionally charged moment. He had made a huge mistake and one unfortunately for those who loved him, especially his 11-year-old daughter, that he could now never take back. Some of those who knew him felt it was more complicated than that, and it always is to some extent, right? For one thing, he had simply seen so much the world that was so fucking depressing. According to director, Michael Steed, Tony was as depressed as anyone with his eyes open. If you travel the world and you see shit, if you're not depressed on some level, you're a fucking sociopath.

Yeah. Chris Collins would think that it was, in fact, that he did not allow his heart to be broken, that he wouldn't allow himself to be sad and vulnerable and in pain. Eh. He also seemed like the type to, you know, to not do this.

He never seen the type. You know, he's like a fighter. Even some of his crew thought initially that he'd been murdered. Predictably, his family members were stunned. his poor mother Gladys told to New York Times he's absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamed would do something like this. He had everything. Success beyond his wildest dreams,

money beyond his wildest dreams. But to others like Anderson Cooper, Tony's colleague and a friend at CNN, it actually made sense. Cooper would say, I know with any suicide, there are people who are just stunned by it and say, well, this person would never have done that. Or he was the last person I would think would do that. That's what people think.

But in reality, a few things going wrong in a certain order can result in somebody doing something that most people would never think that they would do. And so when I heard, I understood as somebody who has spent a lot of time traveling around the world with and without camera crews and spent a lot of time in hotel rooms by myself and places far away, I understood how that can happen. And it just made me so sad. I love Anderson Cooper.

I always seems like such a thoughtful, emotionally involved, evolved, intelligent human. Tony's first wife, Nancy, too, understood how it could have happened. She said, Tony could be very possessive of. he was a control freak. He just, he liked control. That was the only thing I have to say about his suicide that makes sense, the control aspect.

So maybe he couldn't control who Aesia was going to date, what she was going to do, but he could control his ability to either live with the pain of her rejection or not. Bourdain's body was cremated in France, June 13th, 2018.

His ashes returned to the U.S. two days later given to his brother Chris. Fans gathered to pay tribute to him at a memorial erected outside of his former place of him, employment, Leol, which had closed the previous year. Cooks and restaurant owners held gatherings, tribute dinners, memorials. Many donated their net revenue from these events to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Among the many who offered condolences was former President Barack Obama,

who wrote on Twitter. He taught us about food, but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together, to make us a little less afraid of the unknown. In August of 2018, CNN announced a final posthumous season of Parts Unknown. Its remaining episodes were completed using narration and additional interviews from featured guests with the season, including two retrospective episodes paying tribute to the series and to Bordane's legacy legacy legacy. A collection of Bordane's personal items were sold at auction on October 2019, raising $1.8 million, part of which went to support the Anthony Bordane Legacy Scholarship at his alma mater, the Culinary Institute of America. His custom-made Bob Kramer's Steel and Meteorite Chef's Knife sold for the highest price. $231,250. Anthony was gone, but his legacy was not.

And it would grow in the coming years. The continued cultural obsession with Anthony Bourdain has led to numerous films about his life and work. In June of 2021, a documentary film directed by Morgan Neville, produced by CNN films in HBO Max, titled Roadrunner, a film about Anthony Bourdain had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. In August of 2024, a biopic of Bordain titled Tony,

announced to be in the works with A-24, in negotiations to acquire the film, which they would, with Matt Johnson attached to direct and Dominic Sessa, excuse me, attached to star as Bourdain. That film was released in the U.S. August 7th, 2026.

I just watched it with Lindsay a few nights ago, and it was fucking fantastic. They took a few liberties with the facts of his life as most biopics do rearrange some stuff, but, you know, it was wonderful. And Dominic Sessa, man, star making performance.

But of course, most big-time Bordane fans found and find themselves returning over and over again, mostly to the source. Bourdain himself who left such a huge legacy behind in his own words. In an assessment of Bordane's life for the nation, journalist David Cleon wrote that Bordane understood that the point of journalism is to tell the truth,

to challenge the powerful, to expose wrongdoing, but his unique gift was to make doing all that look fun rather than grim or tedious. In his view, Bordain shows, quote, made it possible to believe that social justice and earthly delights were not mutually exclusive, and he pursued both with the same earnest reverence. And with that poignant quote, let's hop out of this timeline.

Good job, soldier. You've made it back. Barely. Anthony Bourdain. When the celebrity chef, writer, not Albanian baby eater, and media personality died by suicide in June of 2018. Much of the world was shocked. And as the world does, it went looking for answers. Was Anthony Bordane depressed? Did he have, as some have speculated a lifelong chemical imbalance from his early drug,

abuse? Did he return to those drugs in his final hours? Did he simply have an addictive personality that found new sources of highs and lows, whether that be a substance, a job, or a romantic relationship? Was it as simple as a lack of sleep from constantly working? Something as complex is all of these factors, plus more that we don't know about, right? I think that, I think the romance was the straw, you know, that fucking pushed him over. Because Bordane was so influential, and because narratives around depression tend to take center stage in the aftermath of suicide, many have also overstated Bordane's good qualities, making him out to be some kind of angel that suffered

because of something that wasn't his fault. But he wasn't an angel, as he said himself, you know, while he was relentlessly, obsessively committed to his work, while he did touch millions of lives, gave people living in places where opportunities were few new chances to advance themselves and their businesses. He was no saint. He described his younger self as something of a raging narcissist

and likely knew that those tendencies had not necessarily all been conquered over time. He knew, as did those who worked with him, that he was wildly insecure, unable to accept he was making good important work. He was a dark guy, brooding guy who made people uncomfortable a lot of the time, but also inspire them, cared for them, helped him get jobs and make connections. Though he knew that he'd improved the world in many ways,

he also believed that making him into a role model, someone to emulate wasn't necessarily a good takeaway from his life story. In one 2014 interview with Smithsonian Magazine, he'd say, a lot of people think it's okay to get fucked up and work. Kitchen Confidential was not a story about a particularly good or commendable career. It was my life. I wrote it in a way that made it sound like a lot of fun, but obviously it wasn't.

I think a lot of people tend to overlook that. It validates a lot of bad behavior. In other words, Bourdain was, like many of us are, like the world is, fucking complicated. And it was precisely his willingness to accept the complicated state of the world and his life that made him so influential in a time when so much writing about food was still basic, boring, stale, glossed over and fake as fuck. Unfortunately, it seemed like he couldn't accept that complexity within himself or that complexity. although that's still just, you know, one partial explanation. When it comes down to it, we really don't know how he ended up making the decision I made. I made my guess, but it is just a guess.

We shouldn't let this mystery, you know, eclipse what we do know, what he taught us, that what shows up on the plate in a restaurant is interesting and important, but the people who put that food on that plate, they are worthy of recognition too. They are more interesting and more important. That all sorts of people cook across all the world in the face of good times and bad times and that these people shape food, shape other people,

and shape the world. And with that, with that, I can't talk else. Blah, blah, blah. It's trying to be so fucking poignant. I started fucking my words up. On Brandt. Let's head to the takeaways.

Time shock. Top five takeaways. Number one, Anthony Bourdain was a chef, writer, media figure, not Albanian baby eater, host of the shows, parts unknown,

and no reservations, speaker, philanthropists, guest judge, and a whole bunch of other things, too. What united all of his works was a singular vision. To cut through the bullshit, not deliver, feel-good, happy stories ended in a neatly tied bow. In his writing, TV appearances, and speaking tours, he continually emphasized a need for critical thinking to check one's own assumptions about everything from who was making your food at a restaurant to the situation on the ground in a faraway country. But there was also a continual darkness to him, one born of his struggles with addiction,

his grueling schedule, and the fact that he had seen so much, much the world, not all of which was uplifting at all. When he passed away on June 8th, 2018 at the age of 61, the world was shocked that somebody who had seemed so energetic and curious would take his own life. Excuse me, would take his own life. Number two, Bourdain was born in 1956 in Manhattan to Pierre and Gladys Bordane, two loving parents who, despite their seemingly many good qualities, struggle with overspending, seemed to think that their kids should aspire to respectable high-level careers, at least his mom did, perhaps to the point of making the kids feel suffocated. Rebelling against his parents, but mostly his mom,

Tony would find odd jobs around New Jersey, do drugs with older friends, even work as a bike messenger in Manhattan, before setting off for Vassar, a drug-fueling college, whose free-willing atmosphere was super fucking fun, but it also didn't help him figure out what he wanted to do with his life. Instead, he would find that in an unexpected place, in restaurants in Cape Cod, where he worked during the summers, doing copious amounts of drugs,

running a secret catering company, and learning the ways that a kitchen worked, from its egotistical and brilliant chefs to its hardworking and unreliable dishwashers. Number three, Bourdain's breakout would come with the publication of his book Kitchen Confidential in 2000, fulfilling the writing dream he had long had and never given up on, even as he struggled to balance kitchen work, drug addiction, and his first two novels which did not sell well. The book was unlike anything the food world had ever seen a deep exploration of Bordane's own life story,

not from the point of view of a celebrity chef, someone who had made it, but stories from a person who had seen firsthand the chaos and supreme order of the inside of a kitchen, complete with wild characters, gross out facts about how supposedly fancy dishes were often made, and reflections on how some of the classist experiences were the direct products of people living, well, far less classy lives. Number four, as Tony grew older, he became more committed to social justice and exploring other cultures to the lens of food, not only what they put on the table but the unique situations their citizens were dealing with, whether that be war, excuse me, natural disasters or historical events to continue to play a role in day-to-day life. Developed across his work and no reservations and especially in parts unknown on CNN.

He saw his role as someone who didn't provide neat answers to questions or itineraries that people could recreate, but someone who could reflect on complexity and hold multiple truths at once. And number five, new info. Did you know that Anthony Bordane co-authored a graphic novel? Get Giro, co-written by Bordane and Joel Rose, illustrated by Langdon Foss. and Alley Garza. Published by DC Comics under the Vertigo imprint on July 3rd, 2012, I think this is so cool. The story is set in a dystopian near future Los Angeles where culinary status replaces all currency and master chefs rule like ruthless mob bosses.

Rejecting rival-waring food factions and uncompromising sushi chef initiates a bloody one-man war against the city's corrupt culinary scene. The protagonist, Jiro, a ruthless, renegade sushi chef, who refused it to submit to the city's warring culinary facts. actions, the International Fusion Lords, and the organic vegetarian vertical farm triggering an ultra-violent showdown. Borda and Rose returned with a prequel graphic novel as well, published in late 2015, but dated 2016, called Get Giro Blood and Sushi, illustrated again by Ale Garza. It explores Giro's origins as the rebellious heir to the Yakuza crime family who secretly studies culinary arts. And it was recently adapted into an animated series called get Giro. The pilot episode

premieres very soon on Adult Swim during the Tsunami Block on October 3rd, 2026 at midnight with streaming available the next day on Max and check out the trailer. They say in the restaurant business their competition is healthy. Tell that to your fellow chefs

bleeding out the street. The wall between rival chefs, Bob and Rose, is bloodier than your usual food fight. We won't stop until there's nothing left to kill. But they've never crossed knives with anyone like Jiro. This town is full of people who deserve to die. They say revenge is a dishbestos,

but I'll take it. Any way I can get it. He's about to learn that life on the fringes is eat or be eaten. Plain hero in the outer ring will get you killed. You have no idea what you just stuffed in, do you? From Joel Rose and the late Anthony Bourdain comes a bloody tale of action and appetite. You're cooking.

Get zero. Adel Swim's new city. He's been got over eight years now, but his legacy continues to bring us new creations. How cool, man. Life is temporary. Art is forever. Time suck.

Top five takeaways. Anthony Bourdain, hungry for everything, has been sucked. I hope you enjoyed that. It was a nice little escape for me. I feel better. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for their help in time suck.

I mean, I don't, like, just not miss my kids now. But I feel better than when I started sitting down here. Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins. Thanks also to Logan Keith, helping to publish this episode and designing merch for the store at bad magic productions.com. Thank you to Sophie Evans again for her initial research. Thanks to the all-seen eyes, moderating the cult of the curious private Facebook page,

The Mod Squad, making sure Discord keeps running smooth, everybody over on the Time Sucks Surbit and Bad Magic Surbit. And now, let's head on over to Time Sucker Updates. Get your Time Sucker Updates. Our first update this week, of course, from those sending to Bojanglesatimesug Podcast.com, comes from Joel Feathers, sending with the subject line of Glasgow Wedding Crashing. Dear Master Mushmouth, aka the other Triple M. Thank you for your episode on Bible John. It provided two clarifying details about Glasgow that I didn't know I needed. One, that Glasgow's love to fight. And two, even people from that area of the world cannot understand their dialect. The year was 2015. My squadron was leaving our six-month detachment. As a good deal stop, we lily padded in Glasgow.

We were going to be there for 36 hours, which meant we had limited time to leave our mark on the city. That precedent being set, we hit the town. Me and my closest brothers went looking for family gifts first, then kilts for us, and last we went liquor shopping. We wanted that true Scottish scotch whiskey that would put hair on our chests. We spent our time in the town, day drinking, and exploring, hailed some cabs, talked to some of the shopkeepers,

and truly wondered if it was a different language. When we finally made our way back to the hotel, there was a wedding reception going down in the reception hall and the main floor connected to the lobby. So we took our goods upstairs to our rooms, then returned for some party. We ran into one of the motherly figures

from the wedding party who kindly showed us the proper way to drink scotch. She bought us rounds of scotch and beers and proceeded to inform us that we sipped the whiskey, then drank the beer as a pallet cleanser to fully enjoy the scotch. As we continued to inebriate ourselves,

a ruckus took hold of the reception hall. Now I'm not entirely sure what caused the uproar, but what happened next was like a scene from an old western movie. Oh man, I can picture this so well. Some of our Marines had taken hold to some of their wedding party, and the two groups proceeded to throw one another

from the reception to the lobby. There were tag team matches, double teams, one-on-ones, even the full Nelson hold, while Buddy did some bad work, bag work. There were bloody noses, split drinks, or spilt drinks,

excuse me, teeth marks on foreheads. It was a battle for the ages. Luckily, we were taking flight in about eight hours, so the hotel didn't kick us out. They just made everybody return to their rooms. We left there, little beaten and hung over,

but mostly proud of it. of our men working together to the last day. We all made it onto the plane and returned home. Anyhow, that's my experience of the Glasgowwegians. Thanks for all the work you put into time suck, scared to death, and nightmare fuels, my favorite of your creations, three out of five stars. If this gets right on the podcast, can I get a shout out for my brother T.J. With an Ed Kemper-style, brother.

And some note that I won't cut his head off. God bless, Sergeant Mailman, Joel. Well, Joel, first off, thank you for your service. And, man, you guys really made the most of a short stay in Glasgow. Got in a lot of drinking, a lot of fighting. It's almost like you're from there. Impressive. I wish I could have witnessed that melee.

I'd like to say I would have joined it, but probably not. I'm not sure I had the stones for that. Who knows? I guess if somebody hit me, then I got to. Thanks for sharing a crazy trip tale. Feels right on this travel show episode. Also, to your brother, Joel. Or no, not your brother.

Wait, you're, that's your brother, TJ. God damn it, Camper, get it straight. Brother, DJ. Hey, Joel's not going to cut your head off and fuck your neck. But if you get examples riled up, you might come close. So don't get him going. Thanks, again, dude. Next up, science-minded sack, almost to Dr. Williams,

sent in a message with the subject line of 523, Immortality Industry Extension. Hi, Dan, Lindsay, and the whole bad magic team. I'm writing in today about the Immortality Industry episode, 523. I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in my last year of studying, regeneration in salamanders. So as you can imagine, of all the times like episodes, I've listened to over the last four years, this was my absolute favorite. I want to first applaud you for your pronunciation of several terms throughout the episode. So is how much effort you guys put into this.

I'm writing in today, not with a correction, but rather an extension on the regenerative medicine portion of the episode. While you mentioned 3D printing and pigs who have been genetically modified to have human-like organs for transplant, you guys did not mention the third and arguably best method for the future of regrowing organs. This method is called de-cellularization and re-steliorization. The simplified explanation of how this works is scientists take a full pig organ, say a heart, for example, and wash it with detergents until it is fully decelerized. In other words, all of the pig cells are washed away leaving only the extracellular protein matrix. They're super cool looking if you're interested.

I highly recommend looking up ghost hearts. Once fully decelerized, scientists then take stem cells from a patient who needs a transplant, seed the ghost heart with them. This is fucking insane. Over time, those stem cells fully re-cellularize the heart, and voila, la, your very own heart grown outside of your body ready for transplant. No need to wait for an organ donor to die and no need to be on immunosuppressers for the rest of your life because your body will not reject your own organs. Scientists have already been able to do transplants with these resellularized hearts and mice, and the first human ones produced so far are big enough to be implanted into a two-year-old girl, companies are currently trying to scale this up so they could do a clinical trial in adults.

It's much easier and ethical to ask a grown man if he understands the risk, then parents are a desperate situation. If all goes to plan, the Regen Valley in Manchester, New Hampshire will act as a custom human organ manufacturing city. Designing all kinds of organs for transplant. You can certainly imagine a future where this could extend lifespans by many, many years. Have an old junk kidney? Make a new one. Have cancer isolated in just one organ? Replace the whole thing. The one issue with this, which you actually mentioned in the episode, kudos again, is your brain.

At the end of the day, as much as it would be fun to replace all our old body parts and perhaps catapulting the old ones one at a time for your own entertainment rather than your whole corpse at your funeral. Nice. The question remains, what about your brain? To partially answer this, I'll explain the salamanders I study. They're actually able to regenerate large parts of their brain back to the way they were before injury or removal. The only problem is, even if the animal is regenerating his brain on a cellular level, how do you ask these creatures if they're not, they feel like themselves or have retained their memories. The simple answer is that you can't.

So perhaps one day, while you can replace all other body parts as often as you can afford, your brain might be the final piece of the puzzle when it comes to achieving true immortality. Anyways, thank you for humoring me with its extension to an already incredible three out of five stars episode, my husband and I, huge fan of the show, keep up the good work. Not quite a doctor yet, Williams. Holy shit, Williams. That info was so fucking crazy, I had to look it up because I thought you were mess with with me. I thought you were just trying to, like, at the end of it, you'd be like,

I'm just kidding. Or just give me to say something stupid. With the whole deceler, re-cellular re-cellarization stuff. Uh, no, totally real. That is so fucking crazy that that's possible and might become a thing so soon. That is incredible. And yet another reason why we need to keep funding real science. And why fucking clowns like RFK should not be in charge of anything scientific.

Let real scientist science. If you're not a scientist, shut the fuck up and get out of the way. If you think you know better than the scientific community, even though you only have a high school diploma education or a non-scientific degree collegiate education, you're not fucking smarter than the scientific community. You're walking pile of Dunning Kruger effect. Sit down, shut the fuck up

so people like soon to be Dr. Williams can greatly improve all of our lives. Keep going, Williams. Nimrod commands that we need you. And now a final message from John Draper. A sucker keeping tabs on a down-under dirtbag. He sent out a message with the subject line of Snowtown Killer Paroled. Hey guys, thanks for all you do.

This relates to episode 442, The Snowtown Murder's Seven Years of Insanity in South Australia. And then there's a link there to some information. Finally, I have something to contribute. Take care. J.D., John Draper. Yes, J.D. It does appear, obviously based on the link you sent me and I looked at other sources,

that Jamie Lassakis, just 47 years old, has begun to be paroled in South Australia. He was moved, it seems. It's kind of tricky the way they write it, but it seems he has just been moved to the Adelaide pre-release center located in the suburb of Northfield, one of the many, many suburbs of that city, which functions as a sort of halfway house. So I think he'll be able to leave the facility here and there from when I gather. No exact details are given as part of a year-long transition process that'll put him fully back into society. Lasocas caught at the age 19, helped torture and kill his own half-brother, Troy Yode, and his step-brother David Johnson, and more. He confessed in 2001 to four murders, including Johnson's, became a key witness for the crown, the detail he provided, supported by other evidence, helped convict the group of killers' leaders,

John Bunting and Robert Wagner. These guys, some of whom were petos, claimed to be vigilantes. It's been a while since we did that episode. You know, kill another rock spiders, but actually they were just fucking killing people so they could steal their benefits checks because they didn't like him. I did feel bad for Jamie in that episode because his stepdad was the leader of this group, he was raised to be part of it, and in his fucking complete hellscape of the neighbor. he grew up in, he was sexually abused by

numerous people, family members, and a neighbor. He was still a kid when the Snowtown crew did what they did, just 19 when he was arrested. So, you know, I guess I'm not so opposed to him being released, you know, and I hope he does something good with the rest of his life. And if he ever fucks up and hurt somebody, you know, again, I do hope

he's locked up forever. Thank you for the messages, everybody. Six times, suckers, I needed that. We all did. Well, thank you for listening. to another bad magic productions podcast, be sure and rate and review time suck if you haven't already.

You know, if you get dumped, if you just get out of a really, really powerfully emotional relationship, just fucking take a second. Please don't make any rash decisions. Don't be impulsive. Just sit on it. Talk to a therapist, right?

Just take a bit. Things are probably not nearly as dire as they seem. Just calm down as best you can. Please. And keep on sucking. I think it feels fitting to end on a clip of Bourdain, sharing some of what he learned, right? Hear directly from him.

So how about this short clip? This is what played over the credits of the final episode of No Reservations. It's been a wild ride. A lot of miles, a road sometimes smooth, sometimes hard and ugly. And I guess I could tell you that if you look hard enough, that just next door, just as interesting as the other side of the world. But that's not exactly true. If I do have any advice for anybody, any final thought,

if I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move as far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in somebody else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, Move. Yes.

How perfect. Get up off the couch. Open your mind. Move. Meet as many different people as you can learn that they're more like you than they are different despite the propaganda you may hear. And just continually stay curious.