#219 Tony Bourdain: The Definitive Biography

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

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

• 0:43David Senra?

  a fledgling cook, dedicated beach bum, thrill-seeking drug addict, journeyman chef, ambitious young writer, semi-reluctant television star, steadfast spouse and father, supportive friend and collaborator, I came to realize that I'd really only known a fraction of who Tony was, what motivated him, his ambivalence, his vulnerability, his blind spots, and his brilliance. As he said once he became famous, "You never know the consequences of getting what you want until you get what you want." When I agreed to be Tony's assistant, I'd been juggling writing and paycheck-type work for many years, and there were times when I grew frustrated with the more mundane aspects of the job.

• 1:28David Senra?

  But if I was gonna do the work, I knew there was no one better than Tony to do it for. And now I feel compelled to add that I'd gladly trade this life of being a real writer to resume the privileged burden of making his hotel reservations and scheduling his dishwasher maintenance if it meant that Tony could still be here among us. Barring that, I'll settle for having helped the people he loved tell the following version of his story.

• 1:56David Senra?

  That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, and is written by Laurie Woolever. So I've said a number of times before that one of the benefits of reading biographies and autobiographies is not only do you learn a lot from the life experience of somebody else, you get to profit and benefit from that, but at the end, you really feel like you know the person that you read about. You get a sense of who they were as an individual, as a fellow human, right? And that feeling comes after you read the biography. Out of the over 200 biographies that I've read so far for this podcast, this is the first time where before I picked up the book, I felt like I knew this person. For a decade, maybe even longer, I was a huge fan of Tony Bourdain's work. I read his books, I've watched every episode of his shows, and I've learned a lot about

• 2:40David Senra?

  the world from him and his work. And so I was one of the millions of people around the world that were just absolutely shocked and devastated when he decided to kill himself. And what I discovered the last week, I spent 30 hours studying Anthony Bourdain, including reading this book. I watched the documentary Roadrunner, a film about Anthony Bourdain that was just recently released, and spent several hours watching his shows and listening to him talk. And what I discovered through all this is like, was there's just so much more to who he was and his story that I just did not know before doing all this research and reading this book. So I have no idea where this podcast is going to go. You and I are going to have to figure this out as we go along. All I know is this is going to be, I think, the first podcast I've ever done where the

• 3:24David Senra?

  subject matters, a person I felt like I loved and identified with before reading and spending just so many hours immersed in his life story, which obviously has a very tragic and dark ending, which makes it all the more confusing. So I'm going to go ahead and start, I have a lot of highlights, obviously, I'm going to just jump into the book. This is a very unique biography. When she titled, when Laurie titled, the subtitle of the book is The Definitive Oral Biography. It's a lot of what I'm gonna, when you read the book, or if you happen to read a book, or what I'm gonna read to you today, it's, it's less like what you'd expect, you know, a book to sound like. It is very much people talking. And so what we're reading is the

• 4:09David Senra?

  transcripts of these 91 interviews, but put in a chronological order, mainly chronological order throughout his life. So I'm gonna start with his mom. Her name's Gladys, and this is about his early childhood. And a fundamental understanding of Tony Bourdain is just he had a lifelong love of reading. By the time he was in kindergarten, he already knew how to read. He spent a lot of time reading. His first heroes were writers. Even though he spent 20 years as a cook and a chef, he always had a deep desire to be a writer. And that is the first big break. He winds up writing his memoir, which is called Catch Confidential, which I read a long time ago, probably 15 years ago. And it's from the success of that book. That book will go on to sell millions of copies. That, that led

• 4:51David Senra?

  him to other forms of media, and then him becoming super famous because of the TV that he made. So this is his mom talking. "Tony always had a fabulous vocabulary, and he read early. I absolutely always saw a talent in him for writing. In fact, when he was in second grade, his teacher recommended that we send him to a private school, because while all the other kids were learning to read, he was in the corner reading a book." So he's into reading from a very young age, but he's also into causing trouble from a very early age. He idolized antisocial behavior. And what's bizarre, when you, when you study him, he's obviously an extremely intelligent person, extremely disciplined, but he was also a junkie. Every hard drug that there was, Tony did. And he was a, for many, many years, he was a heroin addict. So this is his brother and his mom, speaking a little

• 5:35David Senra?

  bit about that, even when he was a young teenager. I did wonder, why does Tony always seem to be in trouble? He was a difficult teenager. He was not a great student. He was into drugs, and he seemed to disrespect the system. And even from the time he was about a teenager till he died, because his mom actually dies two years after he commits suicide. He had a very troubled relationship with her. There's just some examples. She's a prominent person in this book. She's obviously interviewed for this book, as was his brother. And his brother's about to tell us a story about the fact that they both did not get along with their mother. There's just examples of abhorrent behavior on her part in this book, and I think I'll go to, I'll get into that in a little bit. But this is just about the fact that his mom was crazy, and they had a very strained relationship. This is his brother talking about this. "I think it was the first time that we realized our mom was heading into her, 'I'm unhappy

• 6:20David Senra?

  with my life years.'" She was acting out a lot that summer and would get mad about wacky stuff. "It was the first time when Tony and I realized, 'Oh, my God, there is something wrong with her. She is really, really unhappy, and she's going to go off the deep end.'" And as contentious as their relationship with their mom was, as angry as she was, and just, they call it wacky behavior she'd had, it was the exact opposite. The experience they had with their dad, they loved their dad. He was a very kind, he was a very kind person. He says, "Our dad never had a nasty edge. He was just nice. He never hurt anybody. He was never mean to anybody. And we just thought he was great. He was never particularly successful. He never made a lot of money, but we really loved him a lot. And our mom was much more the other way."

• 7:05David Senra?

  So we're going to fast forward to when Tony's in college, and he realizes, "I don't want to do this. He's going to drop out. He's going to wind up going to the Culinary Institute of America." Before I get there, though, it's important to realize, like, he really did have two vastly, he was reborn. Way to think about it, completely two separate lives before and after the publication of Kitchen Confidential. Before Kitchen Confidential, and I think he was 43, 42, somewhere like that, when the book was published and it was successful, it hit the New York Times Bestseller List. So he had 20 years of being a drug addict, working in, you know, a bunch of different restaurants all throughout New York City, to then being a bestselling author, and then having the second career. And he says something about this, there's a lot of, not only do I have a lot of highlights

• 7:48David Senra?

  in this book, but I have tons of notes from all these talks and things I've heard him say. And he has this line that just gives you goosebumps when you hear it because when you understand his life story, it's true. And he talks about, because I'm about to give him, I gotta back up for a minute. I'm about to quote Nancy Bourdain. Nancy Bourdain is, they met when he was like 14. They were together for almost 30 years. This is his first wife. They were, they dated for like 10 years, were married for 20 years. They get divorced shortly after he becomes famous from Kitchen Confidential. And this rebirth, this second act of his life, he talked about a lot and he wrote about. And he has this

• 8:26David Senra?

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

• 9:10David Senra?

  it was looked down upon. It was like, they thought if you worked in a restaurant, you were a loser. And that environment, that like pirate, misfit environment was very attractive to Tony. But he said something that was very fascinating. So he talks about the getting a job as a dishwasher changed my life. That's a weird thing to say, right? Because he's like, listen, if I never got, if I never got the job as a dishwasher, I would have never became a cook. And if I never became a cook, I would have never became a chef. And if I never became a chef, I wouldn't have worked in the restaurant industry for 20 years and be what he called himself a fuck-up. And what he means by that, he's made constant mistakes, he was on drugs all the time, he would be high on heroin and at his job, throwing, I have quotes later on, or highlights later on, where he's so strung out that he's throwing up in the garbage can and getting right back to work.

• 9:56David Senra?

  And his point was, if I never had that experience, then I could never be an author because my memoir would not have been as interesting because of all those mistakes. And if I was never an author, then I would have never been a TV show creator. And that also highlights his gift of communication, because this is something that you and I have talked about over and over again. One of the benefits of reading biographies is that you see the person before they become who the world knows them later on in life, before they're successful, before they're famous. And it's very similar to like this. They don't know what's going to happen in the future. And Tony talks about, you know, I'm stepping into the abyss. I have no idea what's about to happen next as I quit. I'm very used to this 20-year routine of working in restaurants. Now I'm jumping into this huge unknown. It's very similar to what Steve Jobs was talking, the quote I used on the last podcast

• 10:40David Senra?

  with Steve Jobs, where he's like, you can only connect the dots looking back. So if you're, but you live your life going forward, so you have to put your trust into something. And he says, you've got to put it into life, into destiny, into fate, into karma, whatever you're going to call it. But it's the only thing that's going to make you take that step into the unknown that Steve took, that Anthony Bourdain took, and that most people never do. That initial step into, I don't know what's about to happen, but I'm going to take this risk is what stops, I feel, most people from living the lives they actually want to live. And so it's really interesting to hear Tony, in just a few sentences, make that connection. It's like, I just took one opportunity, that opportunity led to the next. And then I, once I got there, I looked, okay, looked around, what's the next opportunity? I'm a cook. Well, now I'll be a chef.

• 11:24David Senra?

  And while I'm a chef, I'm having all these experiences that most people, most other people don't have. And if I can write about that, or if I can communicate that to other humans, that opens up a ton of opportunities for me. So this is a little, this is a long introduction to what Nancy Bourdain, his first wife, is going to tell us. That he follows, she gets accepted to Vassar College. He follows her there. And she says, he was at Vassar for about two years. He clearly didn't want to be there. He was going to go to CIA, that's Culinary Institute of America, and he kind of buckled down. He said that this was something he really wanted to do. Before that, Tony always wanted to be a writer. I was surprised how serious he was about cooking. And in the documentary, he says something about what attracted him to being a writer, a writer is that you could have, you could have very antisocial experiences. And as

• 12:09David Senra?

  long as you wrote about them in an interesting way, like you could, that could be your career. And the two people that are showed on screen while he's talking about this are Hunter S. Thompson, who obviously did that, and Ernest Hemingway. And it didn't hit me until I just reread this now, that they also, both Thompson and Hemingway, killed themselves. So he winds up graduating from CIA. This is when he starts working in Manhattan. This is what he does his first part of his life. But what was interesting is that he had ideas for doing shows and for writing books decades before he actually did it. In this case, he has an idea for a TV show 20 years before he gets to make TV. And so this is going to be a lot of the, at the beginning of the book, it's people that worked with him for a long time before he was famous. When he was, when he was cooking, he talked about

• 12:53David Senra?

  wanting to do a TV show with chefs, sitting around in the kitchen, talking about food, telling their stories. He was always thinking about that stuff. Tony came back from a trip from France in the winter of 1979, and we were sitting around, and Tony goes, "You won't fucking believe it over there. Chefs are like athletes. They're like rock stars." And then he made us each cough up $200 and have these amazing photographs done. So you see them in the book, these pictures of a young chef, and they hired a photographer and tried to, he's adding essentially like a little bit of marketing to his profession, if you think about it. In that particular moment, he was a visionary. And so his father was from France. They didn't have a lot of money when they were young. What was also mind blowing to me is before he started his very first show, which you can see on YouTube,

• 13:35David Senra?

  it's called A Cook's Tour, they're like 20 minute versions of what No Reservations and Parts Unknown will become. But you get to, I watched a bunch of the first episodes, which was really fascinating, because when you, he didn't know what he was doing. It's obviously he doesn't know what he's doing. So, but the idea was there. And so you start watching that, I didn't even know, and that's crazy. I thought I'd watched everything he'd done. I didn't even know about this. I don't know how I didn't know about it. But what was fascinating to me is you see, okay, anytime you start doing something new, you're not going to be good at it. And when you compare like his first season of A Cook's Tour to Some of the, like Parts Unknown, like, which is really the culmination of his life's work. No Reservations was good, but he got really, really good and knew really, really what he wanted to do, once he started doing Parts Unknown, which is, that's what he worked

• 14:20David Senra?

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

• 15:01David Senra?

  to August Escafé. I did a podcast about the partnership between August, August Escafé and Cesar Ritz. Somewhere back in the, in the archive, you can find it, but he thought that Escafé, in that book I talked about, he famously wrote like the, the bible of French cooking. And Tony, obviously, idolized him. He was influenced by, by Escafé and like the way Escafé approached his work. He's, he took it extremely serious. And that's the really, another interesting thing about Ordain, when you're reading about him, is that there's so many times in the book, and I think I finally, after reading it so many times, I'd leave a note to myself, I was like, imagine what this guy could accomplish if he wasn't a junkie. Like, the amount of time he wasted just being high on drugs,

• 15:46David Senra?

  because he's extremely smart, extremely disciplined. So it says, they thought the Escafé cookbook was the bible, and they always referred to it. And I think Tony was especially proud of it, proud of it because of his French heritage. He really picked up, and this is what he learned from it, he really picked up the classic French idea of, the job must get done, no matter what, no matter how you feel or what's going on. So that's what you'll see later on, where he's so strung out, that he's working, he's in charge of an entire kitchen. He's got 15, 20 people working with him that he's conducting, he's in charge of, and he's so high, he's throwing up in garbage cans. And then he'll throw up in garbage cans and then get right back to work. He's in the book, and he's also in the documentary. His name's David Cho. If you don't know who he is, the reason you might know who he is is because he became extremely famous.

• 16:31David Senra?

  He's an artist, but he's also just a wild person. He's like a kindred spirit of Bourdain. But he was the artist that, in the early days of Facebook, Sean Parker hired him to paint the murals. He hired David Cho to paint the murals in the first Facebook office. And he gave him stock options for that. And the stock options wind up being like worth like a quarter of a billion dollars or something like that. And so David Cho talks about the first time that he wound up meeting Anthony Bourdain through another friend of his, which is this also famous chef, and now he has a show on Netflix. And you might know who he is, his name's David Chang. He's also in the book a lot, good friend of Tony, he's also in the documentary. But he talks about being interested in maintaining his friendship with Tony Bourdain. And one of the first conversations he had with him, David Cho that is, he's like, "I

• 17:15David Senra?

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

• 17:59David Senra?

  There's nothing else I can say about that. But the reason I bring that up to you now is because David's point is like, how disciplined and how strong is this guy's inner will? And we saw that because he's completely obsessed. He never stops being addicted. Let me see if I can find the quote real quick. And so this, I found it. This is David in the documentary. And he talks about they're having this conversation. And he says, as I got to know him more, I realized it jumped. The addiction jumped. So he goes from being addicted to heroin and all. And there's a ton of drugs in this book. I mean, Anthony Bourdain is an extremely extreme person. It's the only way. Like, there's a lot of heroin addicts. There's a lot of crack addicts. There's not a lot of people that do both. And he was doing both at the same time.

• 18:43David Senra?

  And so, once he gets off that, then his addiction becomes writing. He would, he wrote his book, Kitchen Confidential, and all. When he had a full-time job, he would get, the first thing he said, he says, "I'd wake up in the morning, smoke a cigarette. I wouldn't even brush my teeth. I'd immediately roll out of bed and sit in front of the computer and type. I would immediately, I would do nothing else. I'd light a cigarette and I would immediately type." He wrote all, I think his first, like, two or three books. No, more, maybe more than that, because he started out as a fiction writer, actually. So he wrote several books while, with a full-time job. So let's get more into his personality, because he's manic. He's high-energy, and he's impulsive. He was manic. He had a lot of energy. He was impulsive. No one decides to become a heroin addict after long, careful consideration.

• 19:27David Senra?

  And the reason I bring that up to you now, and what makes it even worse later, is because he was extremely impulsive during the last year of his life. And there's a lot of people that know him really well that, that thought his suicide was, was an impulsive act, that he did not weigh the consequences. And that if somebody happened to be there, or maybe a series of events went down slightly different, that he would still be here. And this also ties, his impulsiveness also ties to his addiction, because the last addiction he ever had was his girlfriend, Asia Argento. He killed himself over the dissolution of their relationship. I'm getting way ahead of myself. Okay, so let's go, we're still in the, this is when he's working restaurants, but he's a druggie. This is what I just said. I've already told this to you, but the note I left myself on this page is,

• 20:10David Senra?

  "Imagine what he could accomplish if he wasn't a junkie. Sam and Tony, these are people who worked together, they're friends, were junkies. But they had a kind of nothing stops me mentality at work. On the line, they would turn their heads and throw up in a garbage cans." And so I already brought up the fact that he had ideas that were germinating for a very long time, one of those being TV show, another one that he wanted to be a writer. I remember running into him in the early 90s, so a decade later, this is a decade before Kitchen Confidential was published, he had this whole thing, I'm gonna write a book. And I think one of the things motivating him, other than the fact that he had a love of reading and authors and writers were some of his heroes, but there's just something you see over and over again, that like, if there's people that say, you know, this isn't how I want my life to be, that's an extremely powerful motivator. So this is his brother

• 20:55David Senra?

  talking about, you know, decade after decade of what he's doing, and he's getting to an age that's like, I don't even know if I'll be able to do this physical work much longer. And he says, around the time that our dad died, that's when he started to say, I don't want to do this anymore. This isn't how I want to be. The long hours, the low pay, the no health insurance and no prospects, and the constant, restaurants close, a new one opens, a new one closes, the constant turmoil. And then what also people notice around this time is just like, these are your people, you feel like you fit in with the rest of the kitchen staff, these are the people you like to work with, you hang out with them after work, but he wasn't like them. And he says, it did become clear from hanging out with him, that he was so much more multi-dimensional than just your average

• 21:36David Senra?

  chef. He was just so much broader than that. He had his interest in literature and culture and in life in general. And you see that, like, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of not only film, because that was another obsession of his, but also literature and books and everything else, and he peppers all the content that he made, all the shows he made, all the books he wrote, he's constantly bringing up that like historic base of knowledge and adding it to what he's creating. So this is the point in his life where he just starts to get really, really serious about wanting to be a writer. This is like the starving for success part of his life. And so he's gonna wind up becoming friends with, winds up becoming a writing collaborator with him, this guy named Joel Rose. Joel Rose is also married to a publisher who publishes Bourdain's first book. And he says, there's all these

• 22:21David Senra?

  letters from young Tony, where he's so fucking hungry. I've gotten these emails from people. I used to write these emails myself. It's the young writer who is trying to sound brash and casual, but actually is super needy and wants affirmation. He just wanted to be a writer in the worst way. He talked a lot about his insecurities as a writer. Can I do this? Do I have anything to say? But he was always so brilliant. His mind was so sharp. He was a catalog of stuff that was astonishing. He would just entertain me. And as much as I was a mentor to him, he was a mentor to me. He turned me on to so much stuff. While he had insecurities about his writing, he was a good writer right from the start. He had a voice that he could access.

• 23:02David Senra?

  And this is maybe the most important line about this whole section, this whole time period in his life. He knew not where he was going. He couldn't possibly, but he was willing to figure it out. And so I want to read you some of his early writing. This is a, so this is from January 1985. So let's say 15 years before Kitchen Confidential is published. And he thinks he's going to write fiction. He does write a few fiction books before he has success switching over to nonfiction. And so he's doing what, you know, all writers did during this time period. We've talked about this over and over again. From Dr. Seuss to Stephen King, they're constantly just sending samples of their work

• 23:43David Senra?

  to magazines, to publications, to publishers, just trying to get the attention, trying to get somebody to give them a shot. And the note I left myself on this is just, this is really good writing. Dear editors, having just read and been wildly impressed by your publication, I enclose these two short samples of my work in progress. To put it to you quite simply, my lust for print knows no bounds, and I am hopeful that you might be interested in printing some other fragment of my current project. It's called Chef's Night Out and concerns itself with the familiar themes of hard drugs, hot cuisine, and the occasional cathartic but tasteful bloodletting. That sounds, I mean, that paragraph right there just sounds like something he would have said on his show.

• 24:25David Senra?

  Though I do not reside on the Lower East Side, I have in the recent past enjoyed an intimate though debilitating familiarity with its points of interest. It is my hope that my prose contains some of its flavor. Okay, so he's trying to be a writer. This is really when you were, I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but the, the, the theme here is the same. He's got a desire for a different life. And so his dad winds up dying. His dad died, you know, penniless, but he was the beneficiary of a trust fund. His dad was, from like an aunt. And then when he dies, it passed to his brother, the, the two Bourdain sons. So Chris Bourdain and Anthony Bourdain, they wind up getting, you know, like $200,000, something like that. A lot of that money went straight into Tony's veins because he hasn't kicked, this is

• 25:09David Senra?

  still a couple of years before he kicks his heroin addiction. And the point, the problem was also his wife was a heroin addict too. So they would like disappear for, sometimes for like a week or two, and they would just be shooting up and, and not doing anything. But at this point, Tony's like, maybe I'll just get out of here. Like, I'll get out of New York. Because he was obsessed with just going to a foreign country, somewhere that had a beach, and just being a beach bum. He, he liked to tan, he liked to drink. He's like, I'll just tan during the day, drink, and then at night, I can just support myself working in any restaurant. So it says, Tony and Nancy were talking about buying a little casita in St. Martin. He said, "Yeah, we're just gonna go live there. And I'll be able to go to the beach every day and just sprawl out and tan, and find some kind of job in a restaurant down there." He let himself be talked out of that idea by our mom. I remember him saying, "I should have never let her talk me down from that idea."

• 25:54David Senra?

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

• 26:37David Senra?

  "I remember with great clarity when Tony just threw his hands up in the air and said, 'I can't take you anymore.' When I eventually went to prison, he was just lifesaving. He was encouraging me to write, to read books. It was a time in my life when I had run out of friends, and he and Nancy were the only ones who would take my call." And so this time, he's still writing fiction. He actually writes a book. I probably read it. It's a fiction book called Gone Bamboo. And I just want to reiterate to you the fact that he had this, this dream of just a different life. Even towards the end of his life, he, he meets with his partners, and I think I'll talk about this later. Been partners for 20 years on the TV show. And he's like, I don't want to do this anymore. Like, I have a relationship. I'm just gonna quit doing television because I don't want to travel 250 days a year. And I'm gonna go and I'm gonna move to Italy with Asia and I'm gonna grow old.

• 27:22David Senra?

  And they're like, okay, go. And he, he just wouldn't. He has these, it's really frustrating to read and to think about this person that's extremely talented, extremely disciplined. And yet, he would just, there was something stopping him from doing what he actually wanted to do at different points of his life. And this is one example of that. He worried about him and Nancy just being able to pay the bills. He had nothing and he was frightened. He just dreamed of living the life that he later wrote about in Gone Bamboo. That was his dream, one day, to be able to just lie on the beach and have a cocktail in, in some shack in the sand. And so now we're getting to the point where he's gonna write Kitchen Confidential. And I already mentioned this to you, but this is a point in the book, I was like, before reading this, I kept thinking, like, if you only apply your junky work ethic to something productive, you'll, you will succeed.

• 28:06David Senra?

  Like, he goes through great lengths to score drugs and just all the time that he wasted with his drug addiction. Eventually, he figures this idea off himself and he turns that, he gets off drugs and he turns that, that addiction, it jumps from drugs to work. Later on, it'll be jujitsu. It's almost every time a new relationship, he becomes extremely addicted to whoever the woman he's involved with at the time might be. But he says, all the energy he put into trying to destroy himself, he put that into building himself back up. All that negative energy became something else. He became so serious and so driven and focused. And he's doing this, this is rather inspiring because he's doing this when he's 40 years old. One of the few people who can spend multiple decades being a, being a loser or a screw

• 28:50David Senra?

  up and like, this is, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm gonna change. He worked really hard. It takes a lot of determination to wake up early in the morning and write, and then go do a job in the kitchen and come home at god knows what hour and get up the next morning and do it again. He was a fiend. One time, he said about his disciplined writing regimen, this is classic Anthony Bourdain here, "Such was my lust to see my name in print. He threw himself into his work in a manner that I found astonishing." And so now we hear the perspective, this is the owner of the last restaurant that Tony ever worked in, Leihao. He winds up being in his first show. He winds up traveling with Tony in a cook's tour. He also, if you've watched No Reservations in Parts Unknown,

• 29:35David Senra?

  he also pops up a few times. His name's Philippe. And this is what he said about the work ethic. I was leaving, as I was leaving, he gave me two books, Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo. These are the two fiction books that Tony wrote before writing Kitchen Confidential. It was like he pulled the curtain back. The sort of work it takes, the focus, style, intelligence, a big mental museum of experiences and drive to write a book. I was very impressed. He was not just a cook anymore. He was a real person. I read the books and they were pretty good. And then I was really, really impressed. And so the precursor to Kitchen Confidential was a piece that Tony writes for The New Yorker, a long-form piece that eventually turns into the book Kitchen Confidential. And I knew from the response to the piece in The New Yorker, I was like, oh yeah, this is the

• 30:19David Senra?

  start of Kitchen Confidential. And this is something, we have something here. The piece was published in The New Yorker. It was really loaded with everything he had in him. The consequences were pretty amazing. It was not just the intellectuals commenting on it. The TV was there, radio was there. Journalists came to interview him at the restaurant. There was something that was touching people differently. What's crazy is there's footage in the documentary. He's working full-time. He's still running the kitchen. And so he gets a call, and this is on film. He gets the call while he's in the kitchen. He's dressed in his chef whites and everything else. And they tell him, oh, guess what? The book is a New York Times bestseller. And he absolutely could not believe it. He was convinced that, okay, yeah, that's fine. The book sold. I'm going to get 15 minutes of fame. And then I'm just going to go right back to work in the kitchen. He had no idea

• 31:03David Senra?

  what was happening. And for many years, he has this experience that he describes in this great metaphor. And he's like, listen, I feel like I've stolen a car, a really nice car. And I keep looking in the rearview mirror for flashing lights.

• 31:17David Senra?

  And so he describes, Tony describes his life at the point where Kitchen Confidential changes everything. He says, "Oh, man. At the age of 44, I was standing at kitchens, not knowing what it was like to go to sleep without being in mortal terror. I was in horrible, endless, irrevocable debt. I had no health insurance. I didn't pay my taxes. I couldn't pay my rent. It was a nightmare." And so this is when his addiction is going to jump. He's going to wind up going on book tour for like two years. And that's when he starts writing the second nonfiction book, which is called A Cook's Tour, which is the same name as the first show he had. But he says something that I thought was interesting. And he talks about having to, there's a who he might be real internally as a person, like what his default mode might be that he knows

• 32:02David Senra?

  is unproductive and is not going to lead to a happy life. He's got to find a way to avoid that. And he uses it like describing another person. And so he says, "I understand there's a guy inside of me who wants to lay in bed and smoke weed all day and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid and outwit that guy." And before I transition into his second act, the second life that he had, this born-again period in his life, this is an example because they interview a lot of, they interview like his publishers and his agent. And his first publisher made a drastic mistake of selling too early. Imagine having, making an investment, you know, they're rolling the dice, this guy's relatively unknown, and the investment pays off more than you could ever imagine. This

• 32:46David Senra?

  book is going to sell millions and millions of copies. And they sold the paperback rights. So she says, "We wouldn't have sold the paperback rights if we knew how enduring and amazing it was going to be." Because this would continue to sell for years and years and years. Then when people would discover his TV show, they'd buy the book. And so he says, "We were a new company, and we were trying to be profitable pretty early on, and so we sold it." And you're talking about what? Top 1/10 of 1% in book, all books sales? Like, it's very rare for, yeah. I read an astonishing stat that's kind of depressing, honestly, the other day, that 98% of every, of all books sell less than 5,000 copies.

• 33:29David Senra?

  So now we get into, we see that his addiction is jumping. And he says, and he was terrified. He just thought, okay, I'm gonna have success. He says it in writing. He says it in interviews. Oh, okay, I know I'm gonna be working back in the kitchen. He never worked back in the kitchen. But he, and a lot of that had to do with the fact that he was just addicted to, to learning a new craft. He was really hyped up because at the point, the book was a big success and he was getting offers from all over the place. And he said, "The brass ring comes around only once, and I'm gonna grab it with both hands." He knew that this was his big opportunity and he might not get another one. He didn't want to slow down. He thought everything was gonna be taken away from him really quick. So we're at the point in the book where we're introduced to one of, what's gonna become one of his best friends. They're friends for 20 years. If you watch Tony's shows, you know who he is. His name's Eric Repair.

• 34:14David Senra?

  He was like the opposite. He was a chef, but he was like a Michelin, a star-awarded chef, like high-end. It's the opposite of the environments that Tony wound up working in. But Eric read his book and reached out to him, and they wind up developing a relationship. And he says, "I was fascinated by Kitchen Confidential. I read it very quickly because I was totally absorbed by the book. And I called him and I wanted to talk to him. And I wanted to know who he was. So I invited him to Le Bernardin, this is Eric's restaurant, to have lunch. So I see this elegant man with good manners, smart, very articulate. There's actually video of this because Tony brought a camera crew with him. We had a fantastic lunch together. So we really, and we really understand that we are very different and come from very different backgrounds. The culinary backgrounds that we have are opposite. They're opposite worlds.

• 34:59David Senra?

  He comes from a ship with pirates, and I come from the kitchen of Rubuchon, which is like the army. We decided to see each other for drinks, and that was the beginning of the friendship." And Eric also gives one of the best, like the most touching and rather sad moments in the documentary. I was actually talking about this with my mother-in-law last night because she happened to see the documentary too. It's called Roadrunner again. If you haven't seen it, I'd rent it immediately. It's fantastic. But, um... He's asked towards the end, because in the book and in the documentary, you see the devastating aspects. Like, it's one thing to say, "I'm in pain." You know, Tony felt lonely, but he didn't have to feel that way, because everybody loved him. He had friends that he could have turned to, and you see them just crying their eyes out. Towards the end of the documentary, they talk about it.

• 35:44David Senra?

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

• 36:29David Senra?

  of trying to get really good at something, of trying to improve. And that's a great way to spend part of the journey of life. But at the end of the day, like, the people that we interact with, friends, family, the people that actually have the memories are, this is what is, they're going, that is what they're going to talk about when you leave, when your story is finished, when your book is written. And it's honestly some of the hardest things to read and to watch. You just see, you can never underestimate the impact that you make on people around you.

• 37:00David Senra?

  And what's so frustrating about this is, like, Tony didn't see it. When, one of the last scenes, they're in, um, I can't remember if this is the show they did in Spain or if this was in France, but I saw the clip, and Eric's telling, I'm pretty sure it's the last show, and Eric's telling Tony about the impact that you've made for the lives of other people through what you're doing. And he was extreme, Tony was extremely dismissive of it. And one of his friends, who's in the book, I'll get to her later, I think her name is Allison, and she's just like, he didn't think people loved him. And this book is, it was an amazing read, but it was heavy.

• 37:37David Senra?

  Like, there was, there is, the last thing in the book is words from his 11, or I think she's, she might be 13-year-old daughter. I think she was 11 when he died, so I think she might be 14 now. And she was interviewed for the book, and I almost, I almost did that as the opening. And I decided, like, I'm not, like, you gotta read the book. Because that's just...

• 38:03David Senra?

  What I'm saying is, I don't think I could read her words out loud.

• 38:09David Senra?

  And then when you go back and you see, it's mentioned in his, like, once you know how his story ends, you go back, I think I've told you this before in other episodes where it just came up to my mind, like, you go back and read, and watch the Argentina, the Buenos Aires episode of Parts Unknown. He's sitting with a therapist. He's talking about the fact that he, sometimes he wants to kill other people and kill himself, that he's not happy. There's other, there's a ton of quotes I have from him. Loneliness, separation from my daughter, existential despair. I'm on the road about 250 days a year, and I stay in a lot of beautiful places and look out the window at a lot of beautiful views, but I'm usually alone. Loneliness kills, man. And he mentions over and over again, it's so spooky to watch this after the fact, about hanging himself.

• 38:51David Senra?

  I just watched an interview right before we started, where he talked about, he had this really bad shoot in Spain. He's just full of depression, existential dread, and he's like, why not just hang myself? Here's another example. There have been times, honestly, in my life that I figured, I've had a good run. Why not just do this stupid thing? This selfish thing. He knew it was selfish. Jump off a cliff into water of indeterminate depth. And so you learn from that experience, the devastation that you leave in your wake if you choose that path, and like, your loved ones are gonna have to suffer. Like, his daughter, she could live for another 60 years, 70 years without a father. Decades longer than she, than that needed to happen.

• 39:34David Senra?

  And yet, at the same time, you're almost in awe that Tony lived multiple lifetimes. He lived a full life and he died at 61 years old. He had, there's another quote I want to bring to your attention. He says, "When I die, I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets," this is even crazier when you think about how it ends. "My regrets will," because this is, this is how it turned out. "My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted, and advantages squandered." All right, so we got to get back to, to the story though, because there is things to learn from him. You know, it's, this is like a, a hard thing to go through, to like, think about.

• 40:17David Senra?

  But there is, you know, no person's all, obviously all bad or all good. This is an example, one thing Tony figured out that's, that's useful is like, you, you gotta sell your product. It doesn't matter what it is. We just saw this with Estee Lauder, Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Ogilvie, like you sell, sell, sell. I remember early, early, and this is rare with especially people that, less so with obvious entrepreneurs. They didn't understand that, but less so with the, like, the, in Arnold's case, he talked about how movie stars, they were just pathetic at this. They thought, "Oh no, I shot the movie, my job is done." He's like, "No, your job is only beginning. Let's get out there and get as many people to see this movie as possible." Tony went out, really it's like the, the, the personification. I guess this isn't even the right idea, because I was going to just quote Ted Turner,

• 41:00David Senra?

  when he said, "Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise." Anthony Bourdain was like, "Late to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise." I remember early, early on, Kitchen Confidential just come out. Another author drove out there with him, so they're doing like these like, uh, book tours. And he says, "Tony came back and said, 'This author gave me really good advice. Stay public. You gotta promote, promote, promote, or all of this dies. You've just gotta be out there all the time.'" Tony embraced that, and he was really good at promoting his brand. So this is more about the fact that Tony just had deep historical knowledge, not only about the cooking industry, about films, literature. And this is, he's interesting to talk to, to be around. And so he's able to develop relationships with other people. These are two chefs from, from Canada.

• 41:44David Senra?

  They have this really successful restaurant up there called Joe Beef. I think it's in Montreal, if I'm not mistaken. Says Fred and I have obscured knowledge of old French cooking. We've been, that's his partner. We've been down that rabbit hole for many years and so, and for so long that we can converse with very few people about the deep, very historic French cooking. We clicked immediately with Tony because Tony knew who, and they're going to list a bunch of French chefs, there's no way in hell that I'm going to pronounce their names. I'm going to skip over their names. But he says, you know, Tony knew the same people we knew. That he had this deep historical knowledge. None of our peers have, have that in-depth historical knowledge of French cooking. It was like, yay, we have another nerd to play with.

• 42:23David Senra?

  And so another lesson to learn from Tony is the value of being adaptable and being able to move fast. This is going to actually, his approach to his, this, this, this rebirth, his second career, because he had no idea, like this guy's going to win Peabody's and Emmys and have 10 million people watching his show is just from where he started. The Kitchen Confidential part is like, there's just no way you could have predicted this. Not, not one bit of this was planned. From the moment he signed up for Kitchen Confidential to signing up for his next book, it wasn't strategized, it wasn't building a platform or a brand. He said, we're just kind of, he said, we'll just see what happens. We will wing it. We were, we were following Tony's instincts. That's a really powerful sentence, actually. It reminded me of Herb Keller, which is the, one of my favorite founders I've ever come across, because he's just fun to read about. He, he had fun.

• 43:09David Senra?

  Like he started Southwest Airlines. Southwest is the only airline that was profitable for like 47 straight years. And running, you know, a large airline, that might even seem kind of like boring. To some degree. And Herb approached it, he's like, well, who says it has to be boring? We can have fun with it. But one thing that Herb was known about is that he wanted to optimize for flexibility. He did not believe in these very rigid, long-term plans. And so, let me read, this is from the book, Nuts, Southwest Airlines, Crazy Recipe for Business Success, if I'm not mistaken. It's the founders, like, 56 or something like that. But Herb is just fantastic. And I'm reading this to you because I think, once I was reading about Tony, I was like, oh, that's kind of how Tony approaches his work, too.

• 43:53David Senra?

  So, Herb Keller explains it this way. "Reality is chaotic. Planning is ordered and logical. The two don't square well with one another. When US Air pulls out of six cities in California, they don't call me and tell me they're going to do that. If we had established a big strategic plan that was approved by our officers and the board of directors, I would have gone to the board and tell them, we want to deviate from that plan. They would want to know why I want to buy six more airplanes. The problem is, we'd analyze it and debate its merits for three months. Instead of getting the airplanes, taking over the gates, and dominating California, the meticulous nitpicking that goes on in most strategic planning processes creates a mental straitjacket that becomes disabling in an industry where things change radically from one day to the next."

• 44:37David Senra?

  And so, in the book, he gets chided by a financial analyst, and Keller, about not having a strategic plan, and Keller says, "We do have a plan. It's called doing things." And so, we see this, the idea, he had no way, the idea of ideas, like, okay, I'm just going to write a new book. And says, Tony says, "I'd like to travel the world and explore food all over the world. That's my dream, to do it and write about it. What if I pick 10 or 15 cities and we can do this?" That is the book Cook's Tour. That is going to turn into a show, because when he travels these 15 cities, he's going to wind up taking, and he's got, this married couple, they wind up being the founders of a very successful production company now called, is it 0.0? ZPZ Productions. So, Tony's the first person.

• 45:21David Senra?

  It's just the two married couple and him start, and then they build up this rather successful business, and now they go on to produce all kinds of things. But this idea that they eventually evolve, that's just thought, hey, this is what I'd like to do. That idea eventually evolves into no reservations and parts unknown, and is why most people know who Tony Bourdain is now. Because of that just random idea right there, that I'm just going to be flexible, let's see what happens. And so before we jump into his-- this is why I think if you're interested in Tony Bourdain, you should also go to YouTube and watch the first few episodes, the first season of Cook's Tour, because you're like, wow, this is so different than what it's about to become. But we've got to go back to his mom, because his brother just hammers his mom in this book over and over again. The fact that she was extremely negative,

• 46:06David Senra?

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

• 46:50David Senra?

  They'd go through-- Tony and his mom, they'd go through long periods of not speaking, because she just could not stop meddling. So we have the eventual founders of 0.0 Productions, the ones that come to him, because he just thought, I was going to travel around the world and write about it. They're like, well, what if we film it? And so he's, again, working at his job. They go meet him at the house, and it's between dinner and lunch shifts. They talk, hey, would you ever consider making a Cook's Tour into his TV show? And it says, "After dinner shift, we sat him against a brick wall and started asking questions. Have you ever traveled before?" He hadn't really. That is crazy. He had traveled to France as a kid, and once to Japan for work. What was clear was that Tony was very well

• 47:31David Senra?

  read. He had a deep love of film. Those were his points of reference. It was like, I want to go check out the places that loom large in my mind from the things that I've read and the films that I've seen. The whole thing was so ill-conceived. We had no real game plan. This is about just letting things happen. Where are they going to go? You have a basic idea, but you don't know how you're going to get there. There was no real format to the show. We had no fucking clue what we were doing together. Tony felt awkward and weird and uncomfortable. Another thing most people don't know about him, he's an introvert. Very socially awkward because everybody thinks, oh, this is the coolest guy in the world. Like, oh, he was extremely socially awkward. He wouldn't make eye contact with you and it'd take him a very long time to get to know you, et cetera, et cetera. In the first shoot in Tokyo, Tony was a guy coming to terms with the fact that he didn't

• 48:15David Senra?

  know what he was doing and he didn't know what he was supposed to do. We threw him into the boiling water and watched him squirm. It was painful. And in all honesty, myself on this page is a bunch of highlights. This is what doing something new feels like. He seemed very jittery. He was uncomfortable. You could see this wide-eyed enthusiasm for what he was being exposed to, but in combination with nervous energy and insecurity. And so they're like, wow, this is a disaster. I didn't think that Tokyo is the first episode. I didn't think it was that bad. I mean, it's obviously not as good. Like, it's not nearly nothing. It's like one tenth of what he does in Parts Unknown and No Reservations, everything else, but it's not like, you know, terrible, terrible. But the point was is that that's

• 48:58David Senra?

  his starting point, but he was always improving. They wind up going to Ho Chi Minh City. I think this is the second or third episode. I can't remember. And immediately, he's already starting to improve. We always say that's when the show really started to happen because he had already read so extensively about Vietnam. He knew so much of its history. There were all these interesting ports of reference that started to percolate. We were grabbing onto that energy. If you look at that footage, he's coming alive in the field for the first time. He began to understand, I can actually have fun with this. I can do something that has some meaning. And so the guy that owns the restaurant that he works at actually traveled with him. This is Felipe again. And Felipe, actually, he lives now in Vietnam full-time. He was actually in Vietnam visiting when he got the news that Tony killed himself.

• 49:41David Senra?

  But this is a good, almost, what, 18 years, 20 years before that happens, 18 years before that happens. And this is the first mention in the book of And I wrote the word ability. So I put the first mention of his ability to go to a sunken place. And I scratched out the word ability. And I didn't replace with anything else because I don't know what word fits there. But his propensity, I don't know. Like, he was dark. David Chang, in the documentary, says Tony was extremely dark person. And so, they're talking about what happens in Vietnam. "It was unbelievable. The whole trip was absolutely magical because of the state he was in. It was extraordinary. Although I should mention,

• 50:23David Senra?

  in the middle of that trip, I saw him fall into the abyss. It just lasted a few hours, but in those two weeks of complete elation and happiness, I saw him fall, like falling from a plane, down, deep, dark. And then he climbed back out. He opened the window, the door, to show what was inside him. And it was dark." And so he's starting to become more well-known, more famous. This is where his marriage of 20 years falls apart. They had known each other, I think they were dating since they were like 14. Maybe they knew each other at 14, started dating at like 17 or 18. I mean, they were together for a long time. Now he's in his 40s, and they just wind up. And this is also, you see, where he says, "I cruelly burned..." What was that line I

• 51:07David Senra?

  said earlier to you? "I cruelly burned down my previous life in its entirety." This is the start of that. His brother goes to visit him. His brother's married with kids. They go to, you know, "Let's go visit Uncle Tony and Aunt Nancy." It says, "They invited us down to St. Martin to be with them as a family, but they were sort of in the middle of separating at that point, and the plan had changed up at the very last minute, and we found out that we were going to be there alone with Tony. It was kind of obvious that the whole fame and TV thing was not for Nancy. She did not like the attention. She did not like the intrusiveness. I don't think he was happy that he'd just split from the woman he had known since the age of 14. We'd come home from dinner, then we'd play poker or hang out, and Tony would basically go out and get banged by prostitutes. He'd ride around, and then he's getting drunk, he's doing all kinds of... He also talks about trying to

• 51:50David Senra?

  commit suicide during this point, but he says it later on. He doesn't tell his brother this. He talked about driving off one of the mountain roads in St. Martin. He'd ride out somewhere at 10:00 PM, and he wouldn't be back until the time we woke up. He was very upfront about it." And then we have his wife commenting on this point. "Once he had the chance to make TV, came along, and he embraced it. Tony was very smart. And I think he realized this is the way things are going to be. It does a weird thing to a marriage."

• 52:17David Senra?

  So they wound up divorcing in 2005. The thing about Tony, though, is he was, and people said this over and over again, that he, at his core, he was a romantic. He wanted to be in a long-term relationship. Less than two years later, he's married again, and this is where he has a kid. There's actually a crazy story about that, too. I'll share it with you in the book. And so he was completely involved in relationships all the time. And when they fell apart, he would spiral out of control. We see that. He's trying to think about killing himself. He's doing drugs. He's with prostitutes. He's doing all this kind of behavior that's not going to end well. This is wild, what I'm about to read to you, considering how successful No Reservations became, because A Cook's Tour was the precursor for all the television he made, and he's doing it on the food channel. And this is a good example. You've got to have the right partners. He was just on the wrong channel.

• 53:01David Senra?

  "It was a moderately good number of viewers, but it didn't have a breakout number of viewers, and it was an expensive show for us. So as the years went on, I was really pressed by management to cancel the show." And so the show's over. He's like, "Okay, that's it. I had my run. This is over." "Once we said our goodbyes to Food Network in classic Tony form, he said, 'When you figure something out, let me know, because I'll be there.'" We started to pitch what would become No Reservations. It took a long time to sell it. It was a solid 12 months in between the time where they have this idea to actually sell No Reservations. And what's, I don't know, maybe interesting about this is that he was still fighting his insecurity about, because he said, "I used to make fun of TV personalities. Now, then I became one." Because he was a very cynical, it's weird.

• 53:41David Senra?

  He has a combination of awe and wonder at the world, but also deep cynicism about, I guess, the fate of humanity. And so they're filming the pilot for No Reservations. He brings his brother Chris with him. Tony and Chris did the first No Reservations pilot in Paris. They ended up having this huge fight in the field. It was an existential crisis. Tony was like, "This is all bullshit. I don't know what this is. What am I, a TV personality now?" It was just the kind of, it was just two of us sitting at a table where he, again, kind of fell apart with tears. He's crying now, questioning what we were doing and what it meant. We were all scared of our new venture. We were trying to figure it out. I think the underpinnings of his relationship falling apart were really coming to the surface at that point.

• 54:25David Senra?

  So the Travel Channel, if you, well, what's interesting is No Reservations goes on the Travel Channel, right? It was the first show ever to appear on the Travel Channel that had a mature warning, right? Because Tony wanted, he's like, I'm a writer, and I was like, this is going to be authentic. This is, I'm not some fake talking head. I'm not like the rest of the people in your network. This is not going to be me. We either do it my way, or we don't do it at all. And so we're going to see how he talks to the president of the Travel Channel here. And what some other executives or producers, because they talk about in the book, how executives and producers think they know better than the people, like, they thought they knew better than Tony or other people. What they didn't realize, and what Tony realized, is that the way these bland, like, TV hosts and people were viewed, yeah, you might have millions of people watching your show, but

• 55:09David Senra?

  there's not a deep connection. And the authenticity, you might not, like, obviously, I've watched a lot of stuff. There's a lot of stuff Tony did or said I didn't agree with. But the point was that he was authentic, and you felt that connection with him. And he was adamant about not letting other people get involved and distort the product that he was making, which is really the main point of this. This is the president of the Travel Channel that he's going to be talking to here. "I left it overnight, and I came in the next morning and decided that this thing was a judgment call. There was no right or wrong. So I wrote to Tony. Your judgment on all other issues with the show seems to have been okay. So I'm going to go with you on this, but you need to understand that I reserve the right to change it." And then he signs off, "Best, Pat." He emailed me right back. "Sir, you have a deal. If, however, your opinion is going to be based on the output of some clusterfuck group, then we should all bend over right now.

• 55:54David Senra?

  Best, Tony." These emails, now this is back to Pat, these emails, they're burned into my brain. He was giving me a sense of the level at which he wanted to operate, and no detail was too small. When he believed in something, he really went in with it and put his all into it. So then they start filming No Reservations, and this is an editor on No Reservations remembering that time. Tony proceeded to tell everyone to ignore the network. He said, "Completely ignore everything they're saying about music, about story, about shots. Let me deal with it all. I'm going to make the show I want to make across all fronts." I had already been editing for at least 10 years, and this was the first time I'd heard anything like this.

• 56:36David Senra?

  Everyone is always just trying to make the network happy. And if you think about what's happening here is, Tony understood that the focus was wrong. It's not about the network. It's about the viewer. Other people pre-Tony Bourdain had this Flipped. They had, it's just like the Steve Jobs, Scully thing. How you flip is like, no, it's about the product, then the profit. If you put the profit before the product, the profit's gonna go away because your product sucks. Everyone is just trying to make the network happy. And Tony comes in and says, no, no, I'm not worried about that. I'm gonna make the show I want to make, and the viewer is the person I need to make happy.

• 57:13David Senra?

  There is an element to, when I'm reading this book, and I realize he died when he was 61 years old, that he really did live, like, he optimized for adventure, and he lived a full life in just 61 years. And maybe 70% of the experiences he had in his life were in the last 30% of his life, the last 20 years. It's very similar like Teddy Roosevelt, shocking. Teddy Roosevelt, I think dies at 60, 62, something like that. And you read biographies about him, read his life stories. Like, how does one person live multiple lifetimes? And they do it when they die relatively early. This is just an example of that. There's all kinds of stories in the book, this is just one I'm gonna pull out for you. He was like that friend who went to a party, got too high, and needed you to come get him because he found himself in a place he shouldn't be. "We got a call one night. He was somewhere on a super yacht in the Mediterranean with a bunch of Saudi royalty.

• 57:58David Senra?

  He called from the boat and said, can you help me, can you help get me home? I might be in over my head here. Can somebody please help me out?" It was 3 o'clock in the morning. That was the beauty of Tony. You're where? He had always found his way into some weird places. So then we hear from his second wife, this is gonna be the mother of his child, Atavia. And she says, she gave a lot of injuries in this book, she's also in the documentary. She's like, this is the last time I'm speaking about this publicly. This is the reason I bring this to your attention, because this is 2005, and he's mentioning suicide. So it says, "On our first date, he actually told me, right after his marriage ended, that he was in St. Martin, and he was suicidal. He rented a car, and he was driving in the middle of the night on these really tiny roads, going up the hill. And he's like, you know what? If I die here, I don't care."

• 58:43David Senra?

  And that's one of probably 10, maybe a dozen examples that I've found of him. And he always said, that was the first time I've heard about driving off a cliff, because he usually mentioned hanging himself, which is the route he ultimately chose. So it says, and this is what I mentioned earlier about him just being a core, he's romantic, he fantasized about having a normal life, kid, wife, kid, white picket fence kind of thing. That's his words, not mine. "When he met Octavia, there was a shift. His general attitude towards life changed. His cynicism was a bit tempered, and the conversations wouldn't necessarily twist towards the darkest quickly. He seemed very happy." And anytime you're going to change, there's going to be some people in your life that maybe you don't, they don't stay in your life anymore, or something changes.

• 59:26David Senra?

  So a lot of examples of him kind of just drifting away from friends of his previous life. And even tells some cases, like, "You guys don't get me, you don't understand me." I've heard him say this on the show with people he's interviewing. David Chang is another example of that. There's an episode where they're in New York, and they talk about, you know, David Chang went through this similar experience of, "I'm a really famous chef, and I go back and try to talk to my old friends, and I just, we can't relate to it." And so Tony would say some messed up things, like, "You guys don't get me." Like, Eric Rippey gets me, and Mario gets me, Batali, and all these other people. And this is Sam, one of his friends and somebody he worked with for a long time, and also the former junkie.

• 1:00:06David Senra?

  And this is what he says, he's like, "Not only do we get you, but we made you." And so he's like, "This is not true, but this is really the point I want to bring to your attention, is that the resourcefulness and the discipline of a junkie applied to something productive." And so he says, "Even though we didn't really talk anymore, I was so proud of him and the discipline he developed. I don't know where the fuck that came from." And so I think that's a great illustration of this. What I'm trying to convey to you is he literally had two different lives. It's a different person. Now, he took some of the experiences he had in his previous life, his extensive knowledge of working in a kitchen for 20 years, his extensive knowledge of film and literature,

• 1:00:48David Senra?

  and took that and uses those ideas as tools to be really successful as this second life. But he's saying, "I don't know where that came from." Like, he was extremely disciplined. This is more maybe the, again, maybe personality traits. At least, I say they're surprising because, you know, somebody I thought I'd studied further closely, extremely socially awkward. And then you see that his approach, like his addiction, like he took his work extremely seriously. So it says, "It could take Tony, it would take years for Tony to make direct eye contact and say people's names. That all came from his extreme social anxiety." He said later on in life, because he got way too famous, he also developed agoraphobia, which is like a fear of public places, the fear of leaving your house.

• 1:01:33David Senra?

  Towards the end of his life, he didn't want to go anywhere. Most of his last, like, he would communicate through Instagram stories. And almost all the time, it was just him in a hotel room alone, him in his apartment in New York alone. He was quite observant. So he talks about like the people that he'd want to be around were people like him. He says, "I took my job very seriously. Eat, sleep, dream the job." And Tony appreciated that. "It's how he approached his shows. The line between Tony and the show was very thin, if it existed at all." And I think that resonated with people that watched his show and consumed just the work that he created. It reminded me of a great quote that I learned from Coco Chanel in the last biography I read of her.

• 1:02:16David Senra?

  She says, "It's immoral to play at one's living." Later on, Tony sends an email and he says, "The greatest sin is aspiring to mediocrity." Another quote that Tony says, that I think is one of his most famous quotes, is that "Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. You should enjoy the ride." And this one sentence in the book reminded me of that. "Tony respected the willingness to take physical risks, to create risks, the desires to be out there on the edge and to have experiences." Go back to that idea, the fact that the separation, the line between himself and his show is almost non-existent. Most shows, Tony realized, and that's why he made fun of it, they're just not authentic. And so he was very decisive. He stood by what he believed in. He was smart. He knew who he was.

• 1:03:01David Senra?

  He knew what he wanted from the show, and he delivered. It was clear that he had a vision for it, and the vision reflected who he was. And that is not the case with most of the people on television. So what I wrote in the book... As I got here, I thought about, because I'd also, in my mind, I'd just recently seen a clip of the restaurant he worked at in Manhattan when, after he died, Laao turned into like a shrine. Like, you saw this when Steve Jobs died, how people would send flowers and notes and stuff at the Apple stores. And you can read some of them, about the letters people wrote to Tony after he died, about the impact he had on their lives. And I wrote, it's like, some broadcaster, right? Think about everybody else that's on network

• 1:03:44David Senra?

  TV. If these people died, if they died, you'd think there'd be an outpouring of grief like there was when Tony died. And I think the obvious answer to that is no, there just absolutely would not be. The fact that there was almost a nonexistent line between himself and the product he created, I think, is what helped him resonate with so many people that felt that they knew him. And so now we just get examples of this crazy range of experiences, life experiences, that he's having during this time. And this is what I was mentioning earlier. It's like, this is all, a life full of priceless memories is really all that we're going to have. Think about what Ben Franklin knew this, he said this 300 years ago, that don't squander time, because time is the stuff that life is made of. How you're

• 1:04:26David Senra?

  spending your time is the most important thing in your life, because it is your life. So this is David Chang saying, "There was a whirlwind of Bourdain around these years in my early 30s. I think Tony took a shine to me, because he saw a lot of me in him, and I idolized him. Some of the best moments of my life were with that guy. The best hang, man, drinking, smoking, Tony was the fucking best. There was a five-year stretch where more often than not, Tony was going to be there, and we were hanging out a lot, and getting blind drunk together, and smoking so many cigarettes. Almost all of it," to check this out, "almost all of our conversations were based on happiness and the elusiveness of it." And so Chang talks about one of the best nights they ever had together. I forgot, I think they're in Spain somewhere, they're at like a... They're at some culinary conference and all the people in their industry and all

• 1:05:11David Senra?

  the people they know are there. And he says, "It was me." He's gonna list a bunch of every chefs. I'm gonna skip over that. "It was me. Every chef who was at the conference. Tony was there and it was packed." And Tony and I were like, "We don't want to go to this fucking dinner. They make you go to all these dinner junkets. And we're drinking these giant gin and tonics, trying to get out of it, but we couldn't." I do think it was the best dinner I've ever had in my life. Everything we ate, and I remember, we were drunk, but we were just eating it with our hands. And the whole thing was magic. It was like amazing cheeses and lobsters and everything you'd want to eat at that moment in time. I remember looking around at the room at Tony and there was just utter fucking joy. I remember saying, "Even the most jaded, cynical motherfucker can be knocked on their ass." And at the time,

• 1:05:51David Senra?

  I didn't think there was anyone more jaded and cynical than Tony. And he said too, "This is the best meal." And the reason I bring that up is because in the book, in the documentary, in these interviews, you see that people are devastated the fact that he died and they don't have their friend anymore. But inevitably, what they talk about is, they'll talk about the suicide for a little bit. They don't, they talk about the memories. "Do you remember that one time we were in Spain? Do you remember the time we were in Nashville? Do you remember the time where we were here and we were doing this?" That is, that makes your friend, your loved ones that pass on immortal. You get to keep those memories, those pictures, the videos, everything they have from these experiences. In this chapter, David does say that travel,

• 1:06:35David Senra?

  how travel changed, David Chang does say how travel changed Tony. And he says, "All that travel made him worldly and wise. I think he saw things that are real, he saw that things are relatively meaningless. I think that travel was him running away. Every new culture, every new TV project was to fill the heroine void. The more he traveled, the more he saw the pain and suffering of it all. It gave him deep, deep humanity, but I think it fucked him up even more." And then this goes back to this idea of just filling your life with as much experience as possible, as much life as possible. There's just a great line in the book that I want to read to you. "This life isn't a green room for something else." He went for it.

• 1:07:15David Senra?

  And so that is written after he dies. Now, 20 years before he dies, he does that show, Cook's Tour, that I told you about. If you watch the intro to that show, it was very interesting. So we talk about, you and I talk about this idea all the time. I got from Marc Andreessen, I think it's in the book, Hard Thing About Hard Things. So his partner, Ben Horowitz, they're talking, this is like 25 years ago, something like that. They're young, younger versions of themselves. They're in a startup and Mark sends to Ben something. And he's like, you know what I love about startups? And Ben's like, what? He's like, you only feel two emotions, euphoria or terror. And so anybody doing something difficult knows exactly what Mark is talking about. It's like you have the highest highs, but then you have the lowest lows and there's almost nothing in between. I feel that's a way that Tony Bourdain lived his life.

• 1:08:00David Senra?

  There's almost like a bipolar-ness, unfortunately, to this all. And in his first show, he talks about, in the intro, it's like a 20, 30 second intro, there's a line here, I wrote it down, says, "I'm hoping to, I hope to have a few epiphanies around the world and I'm willing to go to some lengths to do that. I'm looking for extremes of emotion and experience. I'll try anything, I'll risk everything." In that line, "I'm looking for extremes of emotion and experience." That is euphoria and terror. He had some of the greatest experiences a human being could have and he also had some of the worst. And unfortunately, there's very little in the middle. And part of that is the way he approached his life. This life isn't a green room for something else. Go for it.

• 1:08:42David Senra?

  The interview I watched right before, sitting down to talk to you, is where he talks about, where he talks about the desire to hang himself in his hotel room in Sicily. This is the Sicily Parts Unknown episode. You see him flip out on the episode, if you've seen the episode, it says, in Sicily, he kind of had a mental breakdown on the shoot. I'm giving you some background because this is about, I want to say about three years before he actually does it. It was also his birthday and he'd almost reached the age that his dad was when he died and it got dark. He went really into a funk and he said that he hadn't expected, because he said he hadn't expected to live beyond that age. He was having breathing difficulties, so full-on panic attack. These are, I'm not like, this is serious. Like, he needed help. He was having breathing difficulties. He was suffering from anxiety. We got him an oxygen tank. We were truly worried about him, worried about his health, for his mental state.

• 1:09:26David Senra?

  And there was a day when he just sat in the garden and he wouldn't film anything. And part of this, when you study him, you realize that he wanted to quit his show. He wanted, he liked doing it, but the toll, the cost was too much. It destroyed his first marriage. It destroys his second marriage. He didn't want to destroy his last relationship. It alienates and lets him spend, doesn't allow him to spend time with his daughter, who he truly did love. And this is what I mean. It's just like, there's multiple periods in his life where he's talking about, hey, I'm just gonna sell everything, go to St. Martin and be a beach bum and live a truly happy life, or I'm gonna quit doing the show, or I'm gonna do something different, or whatever the case is. It's just like, he got the idea, he got to the edge, but he wouldn't step over that. And so I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna read this to you.

• 1:10:10David Senra?

  And then this made me think of somebody who successfully navigated what Tony, I feel, failed to do. "I asked for the fame. I asked to be the big guy, and now I'm accountable to..." And the reason he didn't do this is because now, it's not just his own living. He's got 15, 20 people in his crew, all these people that make money and their livelihoods depend on him. "I asked to be the big guy, and now I'm accountable to this huge group of people, and I have to do a really good job, and I have to be Anthony Bourdain all the time. I chose this, and this is the cost and the price." And so they're having this conversation, somebody asks them, and I says, "Is it worth it?" And he says, "Some days, yeah. Others, uh." And so, out of the 220 biographies, or whatever the number is now, that I've read, out of

• 1:10:53David Senra?

  every single person, when I say like, the one person that is, I consider my blueprint, and I gotta reread the book, because now it's Ed Dorp, A Man for All Markets, I think it's founders number 93, maybe 99, something like that. You know, I've done over 100 since then. He's the, probably the only person that did not over-optimize. He was extremely successful, extremely smart, extremely financially successful. He lived a life of adventure. He was a good husband. He was a good father. He took care of his health. He's still alive. I don't mean to speak about him in past tense. He identified the handful of things that he wanted to be really good at, and was a, lived a balanced life.

• 1:11:36David Senra?

  He did not, that is, one of the most tragic flaws in a lot of these books, is like, the over-optimization of, usually their professional life, to the detriment of other areas: health, personal relationships. Parenthood, whatever that is, and Ed Thorp got it right. And so I want to read this. This comes from A Man of All Markets. The foreword was written by Nassim Taleb. And the note I left myself when I took notes of this is this is another lesson that Taleb learned from Thorpe. Own your life. Don't create wealth by losing control of your life. So this is Taleb writing about Thorpe. Some additional wisdom I personally learned from Thorpe. Many successful speculators, after their first big break in life, get involved in large-scale structures. This is exactly what happened to Tony, okay? This is why I'm bringing to your point, your attention.

• 1:12:20David Senra?

  After the first big break in life, get involved in large-scale structures with multiple offices, morning meetings, coffee, corporate intrigues, building more wealth while losing control of their lives. Not Ed. After the separation from his partners and the closing of his firm for reasons that had nothing to do with him, he did not start a new mega fund. He limited his involvement in managing other people's money. But such restraint requires some intuition, some self-knowledge. It is vastly less stressful to be independent, and one is never independent when involved in a large structure with powerful clients. It is hard enough to deal with the intricacies of probabilities, you need to avoid the vagaries of exposure to human moods.

• 1:13:01David Senra?

  True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one's activities for peace of mind. Tony Bourdain never had peace of mind, ever. Thorpe certainly learned a lesson. The most stressful job he ever had was running the math department at the University of California, Irvine. You can detect, you can, this is maybe the most important sentence in the whole thing when Nassim is writing to us. You can detect that the man is in control of his life. This explains why he looked younger the second time I saw him in 2016 than he did the first time in 2005. Ed, it's just absolutely amazing. I'm going to reread that book soon. And if you haven't read it, I'd order it immediately. A Man for All Markets, autobiography of Ed Thorpe, absolutely fantastic.

• 1:13:45David Senra?

  Let's go back to, so he's doing reservations, he's about to do parts unknown, and he's got all this, this is more of this contentious relationship between their mom and the two Bourdain brothers. This is his brother writing. It drove both me and Tony crazy that our mother just seemed convinced that my son is now prestigious and famous and making a lot of money, so I deserve to have him give me all sorts of money. There was also always some story about why she was out a huge sum of money. Tony would get an email like, hey, I need $50,000 in dental work. And this is more about the fact that she was crazy. There was one dinner that we had that where she, so it's dinner at dinners. The mom and the two sons. There was one dinner we had where she presented the grand plan that Tony and I were going to bail her out. I had found out a few months earlier that she had falsified my signature on a document

• 1:14:30David Senra?

  and had basically yanked our dad's ashes out of the place where we had them stored. She was technically still his wife because they never divorced, but they had separated and lived and his, his father got like in a different relationship. Even though she'd basically kicked him out, she had convinced herself wrongly that he had forgiven her and that they should have their ashes scattered together. So just having her plop down that night at some restaurant and say, this is what you're going to do for me. You'll buy me an apartment and you'll give me a stipend. I think Tony's jaw dropped and I went kind of ballistic about the ashes and the forging of the signature. I said, that's the shittiest thing you've ever done. You should be ashamed of yourself. Ashamed of yourself. She walked out in a huff. Tony and I stayed and had dinner.

• 1:15:15David Senra?

  And then towards the end of his life, there's this writer named Patrick that is writing this in-depth, I think it's a New Yorker, I'm pretty sure it's an article in the New Yorker that comes out. I actually read it. It comes out, came out, excuse me, it came out 2000, end of 2000, maybe November 2017 and he killed himself June 2018. So less than a year before he died. If I, I think I have those dates correctly. And so he's having these conversations. I think this is really important. It's like slowing down and asking like, what am I chasing? Like, why am I, do I know why I'm doing what I'm doing? And then why keep going if you're lonely and it's a burden and you have all these other opportunities? Like you're a writer, you could write books. You don't have to travel 250 days a year. He had opportunities to have his own show on Sirius XM, like a podcast, like an interview

• 1:16:00David Senra?

  show or whatever the case is. Like you were talented, he's talented. He's just an interesting person. It doesn't matter if he's writing, if he's, he had a very successful lecture business where he'd go and sell, you know, 30,000 tickets at a theater just to hear, to spend a night with him talk. He had all other means of supporting himself because you had other people that were interested. They just, he were an interesting person. You know, whether that's coming through on radio, whether it's coming through on writing books, whether it's coming through lectures, you don't have to destroy yourself like this. I asked him about a half a dozen times over, over the year, what are you chasing? Why do you keep doing it? Why don't you slow down? He had shifting explanations. For a guy who was so adept at diagnosing himself, none of his explanations were very persuasive. Says to me, the most persuasive answer came from Eric Repair when he said, "I think Tony keeps moving because he's afraid of what would happen if he stopped."

• 1:16:48David Senra?

  So several times over the last few years, he has this idea. It's like, okay, well, how can I keep doing this but not be away so long? And they came up with an idea where we could shoot an entire season in 30 days, which is a lot different. And so he almost had a way out and yet is messed up because the chairman of CBS, or the CEO of CBS at the time, Les Moonves, just says something that Tony doesn't like. So it says, "He was pushing, pushing for us to come up with another construct that would take less time, way, way less time to shoot." He says, "We could shoot," they figured out a way. It's called "Have Knife, Will Travel." He's like, "Here, look, we can shoot this entire season in 30 days." We went into the meeting with, at CBS with Les Moonves. Les says, "Okay, I like this." Then he said, "Just so you know, this is CBS. This is the big time.

• 1:17:31David Senra?

  Anything less than 8 million viewers is going to be considered a failure." We shook hands and then we went out to the street. Tony lit two cigarettes at the same time. And he said, "8 million people? No way. I don't need that kind of pressure. I don't need someone up my ass like that all the time." He killed it, meaning he killed that idea. And what I thought of, like, there's a lot in this, last week, and I don't know if I did a good enough job on that, honestly, but there's a, describing like the bureaucracy, like the big company, big institution, big organization bureaucracy that Johan Cruyff had to deal with. There's a lot of that same thing in the book where it is, you just have these, these, it's no wonder why Netflix is kicking all these guys' asses because they just don't understand. Like, they think they know better than the people actually making the product.

• 1:18:14David Senra?

  And so all I thought about was reading this book. I was like, man, if Tony, he's just five years, maybe 10 years, too early? Because if you, and I might actually, there's been a few listeners that have recommended, I think there's two books now. There's one by Reed Hastings about the days of Netflix, and then another one by his co-founder, I can't remember his name. But he wrote a book about the early days of Netflix 2 that I might cover because it's a lot of, I mean, it's very interesting. Not only have I been a subscriber to them for like, I don't know, over a decade. I mean, I've been subscribing since they were sending me DVDs in the mail, for God's sake. But, um, so there's, obviously, like, I believe in their business model. I think what they're doing is interesting, and I

• 1:18:56David Senra?

  think they're super smart. But what I've heard from people that sell products, they sell their shows or whatever to Netflix is Netflix just completely hands off. They're like, okay, I like that show, I'm buying it. They don't sit there and call you up and be like, oh, change this sequence, or, you know, edit this, which Tony hated. It's like, you know, Steve Jobs said the reason he didn't want, like, to be second guessed by executives or even focus groups, he's like, use it like, would you tell, it's like grabbing the brush from, this is such a Steve Jobs thing to think, but grabbing the brush from Pablo Picasso, like, just adding brush strokes. So he's like, oh, get out of here. Like, you would never do something like that. And so all I was thinking is like, you would never hear somebody from Netflix, oh, we need 8 million viewers, this thing is going to be considered a failure, or whatever the case is. And like, Tony had one of the best, even to that,

• 1:19:39David Senra?

  like, people still watch this. I've talked to people that didn't even know, like, they see his show on TV, they thought, maybe he's still alive and still making it. But Netflix would have been the perfect, or any of the, I mean, it could, I guess, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, other people might have done this, but that approach that you see now, where it's just like, no, no, we buy the content, you know, we sell the content on a subscription basis to our customers, but we're not going to tell you what to do. That would have been the perfect match for Tony. And this stupid little comment is like, oh, this is the big time, you know, anything less than 8 million viewers is going to be considered a failure. Not that he, when he said that he knew, like, couldn't possibly know what would happen if Tony continued on the path he was on. But, you know, it just, it's, it's, this part of the book jumped out to me. It's just like, oh, you see that little crack in the

• 1:20:22David Senra?

  door, that little light, it's like, oh, he might have had a way out. You know, still get to produce television that he, that he, that he believed in, that he loved, and then, you know, have also a life. It's just a missed opportunity. It's just sad.

• 1:20:37David Senra?

  One thing that to learn from Tony, though, that's positive is this idea, like you'd be a yardstick of quality. Most people are not used to an environment where excellence is expected, and Tony was, you know, the crew loved him, but he was extremely hard on them. He says, "He demanded excellence, and he never settled for shit. He just wanted the show to be the greatest thing ever, all the time." And that's like this obsessive nature, this addictiveness, this like, clearly he loves and he has soul in the game. These are the people that make the best products. The Coco Chanel's, the Edwin Land's, the Enzo Ferrari's, they all, they're, there's a lot of traits that Anthony Bourdain shared with people like that. "He demanded excellence. He never settled for shit. He just wanted

• 1:21:19David Senra?

  the show to be the greatest thing ever, all the time." No one ever got compliments for Tony. And even that, that, and even that wasn't, he's talking about, he was surprised, because like, "Oh, it's good." He said, "It's good to have you around. You should stay." And so, one of the producers on the show, I think it's actually a camera guy, he says, "No one ever got compliments for Tony, and even that wasn't really a compliment." It was like, "Don't leave. You're useful," which was probably as big a compliment as you're ever gonna get from him. And so, we have this complete dedication to his craft, and then, you know, another trait that is maybe less than good, especially in hindsight, wasn't good. He's addicted to chaos. "After he died, everyone was saying, 'Rest in peace,' but Tony didn't enjoy peace. He loved," he says, "he loved, I wouldn't say conflict, but energy.

• 1:22:01David Senra?

  He was attracted to chaos. On set, he would even instill it." This is more about him, the way he worked. A lot of this, obviously, is gonna come from editors, from crew members, from producers, from cameramen, from directors. They give us a really good insight into how he worked. This is something that, you know, there's no like wishy-washiness in his communication. It's like, he, you always knew, it was crystal clear about what he wanted. He preferred clear communication, and I think anybody can appreciate that in an environment that they work in. Like, you don't want this passive-aggressiveness or this like meandering language. Just communicate clearly. That's, "We're on a team here. Let's try to figure this out." If Tony loved something, he would tell you, and if he hated it, he would tell you that, too. He wouldn't dick around. He would give you a straight-up answer. And sometimes, that would really sting, because it would be, it would be an uppercut. But

• 1:22:45David Senra?

  those of us who stayed with it a long time, you would just know not to take anything personally. "It was his life's work, and he never slacked. He would never miss a deadline. It would always be in your inbox that morning." He loved deadlines.

• 1:22:59David Senra?

  So now we're about two years before he dies. And this is the sad thing. So maybe, let's say, let's say the last three years of his life. The two years. So he had two years where he cleans up his act. He stops smoking. He gets really good habits. He gets in shape. He becomes addicted. He switches his addiction. Now his addiction is to jiu-jitsu and training and being healthy. And then the last year. So you have two years of good addiction. Then the last year, that addiction is pointed in a different direction, which is his relationship with Aja Argento. And she's a terrible person. Everybody in this book and everybody in the documentary hates her. And they were warning about her for a long time.

• 1:23:42David Senra?

  But this is about, I remember what Johan Cruyff said. He's like, when he died of lung cancer, realized too late. They're like, your bad habits have consequences and you're not going to escape those consequences. Tony did something smart. He changed his behaviors and started optimizing for health and was somewhat happier as a result of that. So this is one of the directors on Parts Unknown. The fucking smoking man and the exhaustion and the travel really racked up a heavy line of credit over the years. There were times when we'd be out on a hike on a shoot and I'd be like, who has the defibrillator? Because I had Tony on mic and I could hear him wheezing and I could hear him coughing. And this is something I'm super aware of.

• 1:24:25David Senra?

  I just saw my dad for Thanksgiving and I know I don't have much time left with him because he's been smoking a pack, two packs a day for 35 years. And he just will not, refuses to quit. The coughing, the wheezing, it's just, I know what is coming. And so I've been trying, like, I'm not going to make the same mistake I did before my mom died. It's like, I'm trying to talk to him as much as possible, spend as much time with him as possible, take pictures and videos and ask him about his life and write everything down. Because there's no, you know, there's just no, I've been trying to get him to quit smoking cigarettes for two decades. There's just no... It would have happened. You see what I'm saying here?

• 1:25:10David Senra?

  Like, it would have happened already by now. And so at this point, I'm faced with the choice. Like, what do, like, do I keep nagging about it? Like, alienate our relationship? It's like, he's a grown man. He's going to do what he wants to do regardless of what I, anything I say. And I could say, hey, you got two beautiful grandkids, three, excuse me, three beautiful grandkids. Like, you know, they like spend time with you. Like, don't you want to see more of this? But that's really, I mean, if that's not persuasive enough, I don't know what is. So, hearing about this and the fact that he did stop smoking temporarily, Anthony Bourdain, that is, and then he picks it right back up. Like, you have to be really, no, that's myself and constant, like, reminder of this lesson I took away from this book that I've not only talked to myself about, but talked to

• 1:25:53David Senra?

  other people as I've been reading this book is, man, you've got to be careful who you keep around you and who you let influence you. Because they're going to, even if you're, on a subconscious level, or whatever it is, everybody around you is going to influence you. And this is always a dangerous, dangerous person and a manipulative person that you let into your inner circle, that you gave your entire world to. And the book is going to go into a lot more detail than I will. It's just, it's not a good, we're not there yet, so let me, let me go to the fact that he finds a healthy obsession, I guess. His, his, his wife, he, I don't think they ever got divorced, Atavia, because even when they were like, they lived together with their daughter and they were, the romantic

• 1:26:37David Senra?

  element of their relationship ended, but they were still like friends and raising their daughter. And then Ajia's going to be like, no, you need to move out. No, you can't post about your family anymore. And like, she completely controlled his life. But it says, Atavia gets into jiu-jitsu. And her passion, like, anything, anything that somebody's passionate about is like, it can be infectious in nature, you know? One of my oldest friends is like addicted to snowboarding. He moved across the country just so he could be host of the mountain. And his enthusiasm and energy for it is like, oh, I want to learn how to snowboard. And I actually took a snowboarding lesson. So I'm like, oh, I could see why, I totally get why you like this. So it says, maybe I should have, have, this is Atavia, maybe I should have my close friends and family try jiu-jitsu and write about that. And Tony tried it and he really liked it. He really wanted to do it. So then he starts out being addicted. He would, anywhere he would travel in the world, he'd have to train jiu-jitsu in the

• 1:27:22David Senra?

  morning. And if you're getting up really early in the morning, that means that the night before, you're not going to be, you know, drinking as much as possible, because anything's going to interfere with your training kind of gets pushed to the side. He was always making sure that when we were going on shoots that there was a gym and he had time for training. If he couldn't train, he was not happy. And if there was no jujitsu, jujitsu club, and he made people on the crew train with him, even if they weren't, even if they weren't trained. So if there's no jujitsu club, then the case would be, okay, let's just beat the shit out of each other until we're exhausted. That would always get him in a really great mood. He was a very intense dude, and he did find the sport that, he found the sport that matched his personality. His ability to go from zero to a one, to 100 like that. And so this idea of that, the benefit of

• 1:28:04David Senra?

  rigorous physical activity as a way to lighten your move and make you happier is not, this is a very old idea. Greek philosophers talked about it. There's a quote on my, I always save on my phone. I read the autobiography of Nelson Mandela a long time ago. And as far as stressful lives, Nelson Mandela is up there, right? And he says, "My main interest was in training. I found the rigorous exercise to be an excellent outlet for tension and stress. After a strenuous workout, I felt both mentally and physically lighter." And so Tony was experiencing the benefits of that. He says, "The same way I used to wait in line to score heroin, I'd be at the dojo waiting for it to open." He said he was trying to use that kind of addiction mentality for something else. "When you have that kind of personality, it's all encompassing, and it reaches into every nook and cranny

• 1:28:48David Senra?

  of your being." And so this is where we got to the point where his life is, this is the last year of his life starts to turn really bad. And the note of myself is what I just told you, and it's really a note to myself, be careful who you allow around you. They influence you. There was a peak period where he seemed happy. That addictive personality was just all focused on jujitsu. He looked great. He had all this energy. At one point, at the end of a scene, he almost hugged me. And I was like, what the hell? He's not that kind of person. And then fucking what's-her-name enters his life, and he starts smoking again. And it just sort of got back into that negative energy that fit into this weird fantasy character, character that he felt that he was. And then this is his wife.

• 1:29:29David Senra?

  Even though like they're living together, not, you know, married, but they're like friends that are raising kids, right? She says, "He went back into his old vices. He went back to smoking every day and drinking more than he was when he was at home with us. Those things don't really make you feel like going training in the morning." And he was serious about training. He was addicted to jujitsu. He competed in jujitsu tournaments. Again, you can't show up early to train and that's a good, like a good hack to have good habits. Like, "I can't get drunk the night before because I have to wake up at six to work out. And I know, once I do this, I'm gonna feel great for the rest of my day." And so this idea, those things don't really make you feel like going to train in the morning. And so she's going back, Atavia, who's living, I mean, obviously, he's traveling a lot, but they're living together at this point. He's eventually gonna move out because Ajia requested that.

• 1:30:12David Senra?

  And again, I'm not like, he's the one that killed himself, but it doesn't help that you have a terrible person around you and manipulating you. So this is Atavia. He really fell into, he felt, he really felt this responsibility to be healthy. He started actually getting checkups and going to the doctor. This is before he goes on this bad path. He had a CAT scan of his lungs and it turns out that they were totally fine. He was making an effort to be healthy because he wanted to be around for Ariane, that's his daughter. But then, once he moved out, he seemed to be really impulsive. Definitely for the last two years of his life, he made many impulsive decisions. When he told me he wanted to move out, there was, that was not a big shock. For quite some time, we were basically friends. We didn't work out as a married couple, but we would get along so well. There was no reason for either of us to move out or to change the way things were. We were doing really well as a family.

• 1:30:55David Senra?

  But then he fell in love and his girlfriend told him that she didn't want to be a weekend lover. So he decided it was the best thing for his relationship to move out. He told me, "Nothing is gonna change. I'll be there every morning to take her to school and I'll be there for dinner and I'll sleep over a lot of nights." And for a bit, it really seemed like things were gonna work out, but then everything changed and that's not the way they went. And when I got to this point, I'm, you know, close to 500 pages into this book, and the note of myself is just something I just absolutely will never allow to happen. And I wrote, "Ajia. He allowed Ajia to destroy his family." And that's where you're sad and disappointed in this person that you really admire. But you can't let this happen. I'm married and I hope to be married for the rest of my life.

• 1:31:40David Senra?

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

• 1:32:24David Senra?

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

• 1:33:08David Senra?

  Everyone around him, the main point I'm trying to get across here is everyone around him saw that she was trouble. This is, I mean, this is such an extreme example of something that's probably really common. Like, I think a lot of people have had friends that were dating someone, it's like, that person, that girl, that man, that dude, whatever, that person's not good for you and they cannot see it. They can, you could be best friends, something you can know forever, and they have to be the ones to discover that. And in many cases, you would even see, like, they don't, they know it's bad and they keep going back, back, back, excuse me.

• 1:33:43David Senra?

  The extreme example of this is obviously because this is going to end in suicide and the destruction of a life and of a human being that was so loved by so many people. It's just, it's so hard to read this. The last year of Tony's life was really tough for me to watch because he was saying this thing that was like, you know, I put myself way out there and I could totally be destroyed by tomorrow. So that's one person. Here's another example. This is Allison, the person I mentioned earlier. He did say, describing this relationship that he was in, "It's going to end so badly." This was at the beginning of their relationship. He was smart. He was smart enough to know that he was in a dangerous place. Then back to another person. "He genuinely heard from me and from others that her behavior seemed to me and others

• 1:34:23David Senra?

  to be dysfunctional and disruptive and destabilizing, but I think he thought it was manageable." He said, "I hear you. I think you're probably right. This is going to end very, very badly, but it will have been a hell of a ride and I will be fine." And part of it is that attraction to have a hell of a ride, in Tony's words, whether or not, like, it might end bad and I'll have pain after, but it's going to be a ride and another extreme experience, and that's exactly what he was after. There's just some one-liners in this book that are just amazing. This is one of them. Tony gorged himself on being alive. So, at this point, he tries to quit again.

• 1:35:05David Senra?

  He meets with his two partners, the people, you know, his three people that started Tony's television career, himself and the two founders of 0.0 Production. And so, you know, he's like, "That's it. Like, I'm done." He has them to meet at the bar. And he says his opening salvo was, "Look, guys, every good band eventually breaks up. They just come to an end of their run. It's better that we go our separate ways, and I think we've reached that point." So then we said, so then he said, "We're done. It's over." Chris and I were like, "Okay, we got it." Tony said, "I just want to go away. I want to live in Italy." Lydia said, "We support you. Put your jacket on, get up and go." He stood up, put his jacket on, and stood there. They kept arguing. This is Lydia, one of his partners, saying, "I said to him, 'You're full of shit. You're yelling at us that the nature of our business and what we're doing is preventing

• 1:35:50David Senra?

  you from going and to be happy now.'" He wanted to quit the show, move to Italy and grow old with Asia, is that's what he said. "You're yelling at us that the nature of our business and what you're doing is preventing you from going to be happy now. I said, 'You're completely in command of your own destiny. If you really want to go, why are you standing there?'"

• 1:36:09David Senra?

  So eventually, it's the same thing we saw. He's like, I can go to St. Martin and live as a beach bum. I could do, like, he gets to the edge and doesn't go. And that part reminded me of, in George Lucas's fantastic biography that I read a long time ago, he talks about this idea about people being in cages with open doors. Let me read this quote from you, from his biography to you. "It was the importance of self and being able to step out of whatever you're in and move forward rather than being stuck in your little rut." Lucas explained, "People would give anything to quit their jobs. All they have to do is do it. They're people in cages with open doors." And then there's a scene in the book, that's also in the documentary, where David Chang starts crying, thinking about this.

• 1:36:52David Senra?

  And it's something that Tony said to him, one of the last times they saw each other. "I was at a crossroads in my life. I told Tony I wanted to figure out how to start a family. I would love to be a father. And he said to me, 'You're gonna be a horrible father. You're gonna fuck it up just like I did.' I know he didn't say that to hurt me. I know that it was him projecting, but that crushed me." Then he went right back on, right back to talking about Asia. And I'm like, what the fuck is happening? And so now, he's gonna start involving her in his work. And the way I would put this is, and you hear this from the people that worked with him for a long time, they're in their writing and in their interviews, is you have this tight crew that have been working for over a decade together, traveling the world. They have an idea.

• 1:37:36David Senra?

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

• 1:38:21David Senra?

  So from that perspective, like, imagine coming into a company that's been running for a while. You're now the CEO, or the director's kind of the CEO. I know it's not the greatest analogy, but you're coming in as a director and then you just completely destroy everything that they worked on. The reason I want to preface everything I'm about to read you with this is like, the response from these people is completely predictable. The response from the crew is completely predictable. And so they obviously say very bad things about her. This is an example. Her influence on the whole thing. It was Yoko Ono in the Beatles, in a Beatles recording session. She didn't bring anything to the table.

• 1:39:00David Senra?

  And this is where you just see terrible behavior by somebody you admire. He's about to fire one of his closest camera, the people he worked with, a cameraman that he worked for for 12 years. And, you know, this had to be devastating because this guy refused to be interviewed for this book. Tony called me a couple of times that night drunk. He talked back to drinking, smoking, doing all, again, people around you are going to influence you. Asia was a terrible influence on him. He told me that I had to send Zach home that night and I could hear her in the background just screaming, "It's him or me. It's me or him." Pressuring this guy to fire one of his friends. Tony knew that this move, it's like you can never see this person again.

• 1:39:42David Senra?

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

• 1:40:26David Senra?

  And then this is from their perspective, from the people you work with's perspective. What do you think, like, what's the conclusion they're gonna come to? We were like a family at that point. People had been with him for so many years, but now we were all of a sudden expendable if his girlfriend hates us. And so everything I'm describing you is happening in this Hong Kong episode of Parts Unknown. It's actually one of the, it was, it was an episode released after he dies. It's one of the last full episodes they did. But Ajia was the one directing it because the director had, at the last minute, had it like have an emergency gallbladder removed. And so Tony talked to everybody and he's like, oh, it would be great if my girlfriend did this. And then they realized, oh, wow, she's completely manipulating him. So they get back with a shoot and he approaches another producer and he said, he was thanking

• 1:41:09David Senra?

  me for putting together the band, along with arranging a couple of other things. I'm like, what band? What are you talking about? I hadn't done none of this. That was all another producer named Helen Cho. Whatever work Helen had done, he thought I had done because Ajia was trying to maneuver Helen out of her position with Tony. Never before was there a deliberate attempt at misinformation. He didn't understand it. And then just another opinion on somebody else in the crew. She made her way into the inner circle and now is being treated as a director and she brought nothing to the fucking table. And you see Tony on, on film at this time, he's never been happier in his life. They have plans. He's, he's now constantly involving her in his work. He's in love with her.

• 1:41:54David Senra?

  There's, she's scheduled to direct another episode, I think like a month after he winds up killing himself. And while they're filming in France, Tony's doing an episode in France with his friend Eric Repair. There's tabloids that publish all these pictures of while he's in France of Ajia with another man. I think they're walking around Rome, if I remember correctly, holding hands, hugging, spending the night together at a hotel, kissing, all that stuff. And so it becomes worldwide news because Tony was very, very public about his relationship with Ajia. He would post about her all the time. Talk about her all the time. And so you have the super famous person that is now getting cheated on in front of everybody. And so the tabloids start calling him for

• 1:42:37David Senra?

  comment because they're going to publish. Now there's American tabloids calling him for comment because they're going to publish stories and they've had people follow her around the city and basically document what's happening. And this is where, what I'm about to read to you, I don't, this might be the most shocking thing that I learned about this. And I didn't learn about it until I read the book and watched the documentary. So he would communicate through Instagram stories. And it wasn't him talking. He would show what he's looking at and then pick music. And so now we have his producer and longtime friend Helen Cho describe what we actually saw on his last Instagram story. He was still

• 1:43:19David Senra?

  posting Instagram stories of empty hotel rooms with soundtracks from films. He was telling about what had just happened. The tabloid pictures that came out. He posted a story with music from the film Violent City. It is a very ominous soundtrack. It is a revenge film, a story about betrayal and revenge. The beginning of that movie is, I think it's Charles Bronson, it's tabloid pictures of a lover being unfaithful and then that lover taking revenge. So Tony's mood turns extremely dark. Obviously, it's going to be apparent to the people he was working with. The director goes over to him

• 1:44:03David Senra?

  and he says, we're at this old French monastery. The meal is fine. And then I remember it vividly. After the meal, he's looking over this valley. It's just idyllic, beautiful. And he's smoking a cigarette. I go out there and I say, are you all right, man? He says to me, a little fucking discretion. That's all I ask. And I was like, whoa, man, I just want to make sure you're, he says, no, not you, her. I don't want to be on the cover of these tabloids and answer people's questions. That's all he said. And that's the last time I talked to him.

• 1:44:36David Senra?

  They find him in the hotel the next day. And the rest of the book is his friends just sharing like the devastation that they feel that he did this. And it goes on for quite a while. Says, "Listen, if you're in the best mood, if you're in a great place, and this person you deeply love cheats on you, and you're just a regular person, and only five people know, it's fucking awful. He not only got cheated on, he got cheated on and 10 million people are gonna know tomorrow. The social pressure of that makes it super easy to put a rope on that beam and to jump off that table." And then you have other people that just don't believe that that was that person that they knew. "I didn't believe that Tony had the ability to do what he did.

• 1:45:21David Senra?

  I did not see him possessing that kind of facility to end it himself. He just wasn't that guy. And I don't even know who that guy is. But I knew my friend, but I knew my friend, who my friend Tony was." And then another example, "I think he was profoundly hurt, and profoundly disappointed, and profoundly humiliated. And he probably had a moment of epiphany, that he had just fucking leveraged his whole life, his reputation, his words, his family, his money. I think it was just kinda like, I'm done. I'm exhausted." And then the last one. "Something changed at the end. I didn't like him as much. I liked him better when he was just kinda living his best life and looking in the rearview mirror like he stole something.

• 1:46:05David Senra?

  This beautiful life that he had, something people would dream of, and no one else could do it but him. A slit-my-wrist love story is just the shittiest ending of it all. The world is not better off with him not here. It's just not." And that is where I'll leave it. I highly recommend, especially if you're a fan of Tony, and you liked his work, highly recommend reading the book. It might be difficult to get through, but it's worth it. It's just an extraordinary life that unfortunately had a terrible ending to it. So if you want to buy the book and support the podcast at the same time, I'll leave a link in the show notes. You can do that. If you want to buy a gift subscription or a group subscription, if you want to buy a

• 1:46:48David Senra?

  bunch of them, I'll leave links below to do that as well. That is 219 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.