#205: Mark Bittman on Changing the Food Industry and Living Dangerously

Mark Bittman (@bittman https://twitter.com/bittman) is the author of 20 acclaimed books https://www.amazon.com/Mark-Bittman/e/B000APUJB0/ref=as_li_ss_tl?qid=1480902115&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll2&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=e517be3001fd689a70b15061cb8f5a27, including the How to Cook Everything http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764578650/offsitoftimfe-20 series, Food Matters http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1416575650/offsitoftimfe-20, and his latest, How to Bake Everything http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0470526882/offsitoftimfe-20 -- which is on a coveted shelf in my own kitchen. For more than two decades, Mark's popular and compelling stories appeared in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/by/mark-bittman, where he was ultimately the Lead Food Writer for the Sunday Magazine. He became the country's first food-focused op-ed columnist for a major news publication. He starred in four TV series including the Emmy Award-winning Years of Living Dangerously http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00NDOZ92E/offsitoftimfe-20. He's been a distinguished fellow at the University of California, Berkeley http://www.berkeley.edu/, a fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists http://www.ucsusa.org/, and was recently appointed to the faculty of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/. Throughout his career, Mark has strived for the same goal: to make food and all of its aspects understandable -- and he also extends that to a brand-new podcast called Get Bitt https://soundcloud.com/get-bitt. In this episode, we talk about: My fasting regimen -- why I do it the way I do it Mark's favorite failures and what he's learned from them. Mark's first piece that broke him into the world of journalism. And much, much more. Please enjoy this episode with Mark Bittman! This podcast is brought to you by Vimeo Pro https://vimeo.com/business, which is the ideal video hosting platform for entrepreneurs. In fact, a bunch of my start-ups are already using Vimeo Pro https://vimeo.com/business. WealthFront https://www.wealthfront.com/ uses it to explain how WealthFront works. TaskRabbit https://www.taskrabbit.com/ uses it to tell the company's story. There are many other names who you would recognize among their customers (including Airbnb and Etsy). Why do they use it? Vimeo Pro https://vimeo.com/business provides enterprise level video hosting for a fraction of the usual cost. Features include: Gorgeous high-quality playback with no ads Up to 20 GB of video storage every week Unlimited plays and views A fully customizable video player, which can include your company logo, custom outro, and more You get all this for just $199 per year (that's only $17 per month) https://vimeo.com/business. There are no complicated bandwidth calculations or hidden fees. Try it risk-free for 30 days. Just go to†Vimeo.com/business https://vimeo.com/business to check it out. If you like it, you can use the promo code "Tim" to get 25% off https://vimeo.com/business. This is a special discount just for you guys. This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront†is†a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. In fact, some of my good investor friends in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you--for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. Well worth a few minutes: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question? No, this isn't an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Vimeo Pro, which is the ideal video hosting platform for entrepreneurs. And in fact, a bunch of my startups already use Vimeo Pro, including Wealthfront, who uses it to explain how Wealthfront works. TaskRabbit uses it to tell their company's story. And there are many other names you would recognize among their customers: Airbnb, Etsy, etc. Why do they use it? Well, Vimeo Pro provides enterprise-level video hosting for a fraction of the usual cost. Features include gorgeous, high-quality playback with no ads, up to 20 gigabytes of video storage every week, unlimited plays and views, and a fully customizable video player, which can include your logo, custom outro, etc. You also get VIP support. And you get all of this for just $199 per year. That's $17

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  a month, with no complicated bandwidth calculations or hidden fees. And you can try it risk-free for 30 days. So check it out. Vimeo.com/business. That's V-I-M-E-O.com/business. And use promo code TIM to get 25% off. That's a special discount just for you guys. So check it out. Vimeo.com/business, promo code TIM.

• 1:31Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy, but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations. Bloated sales teams, et cetera. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim.

• 2:16Tim Ferriss?

  Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint. And little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera,

• 2:58Tim Ferriss?

  can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront

• 3:43Tim Ferriss?

  that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of.

• 4:12Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, lemurs and squirrels. Crazy Bulgarian seated across from me, you two, you little lemur. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm sitting in a dungeon of a hotel room. I don't know why it is so damn dark in here. And I feel like I am going to have my fingernails pulled out by some type of operative. But before we go down that dark trail where I'm going with this, typically what I do on this show is I deconstruct world-class performers and tease out the habits and routines and so on that you can use, their favorite books, morning routines and whatnot. This episode is no different.

• 4:55Tim Ferriss?

  And instead of a chess prodigy or someone in the military, we have Mark Bittman. Mark Bittman, at Bittman, B-I-T-T-M-A-N, on Twitter is the author of 20 acclaimed books, maybe more, including How to Cook Everything, which is a series, Food Matters, and his latest, How to Bake Everything, which is on a coveted shelf in my own kitchen. And many of you may not realize that I started cooking with baking for the cyclical ketogenic diet, which we talk about in this episode. For more than two decades, that's 20 years, people, his popular and compelling stories appeared in The New York Times, where he was ultimately the lead food writer for The Sunday Magazine, and he became the country's first food-focused op-ed columnist for a

• 5:40Tim Ferriss?

  major news publication. He's done a lot, starred in four TV series, including the Emmy award-winning Years of Living Dangerously. He's been a distinguished fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, a fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and was recently appointed to the faculty of the Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. I'm not high, folks, I'm just in the war room on book launch. That explains it. Throughout his career, Bittman has strived for the same goal, to make food in all of its aspects understandable, and he also extends that to a brand-new podcast called Get Bitt, B-I-T-T. And in this episode, we talk about my fasting regime, why I do it the way I do it, bit of ketosis here, a bit of ketogenic diet there.

• 6:24Tim Ferriss?

  We discuss his favorite failures, what he's learned, the first piece, his breakthrough in the world of writing or journalism, and much more. So without further ado, as I always say, please enjoy this episode with Mark Bittman.

• 6:43Tim Ferriss?

  Mark, welcome to the show.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Great to be here, Tim. Thank you for having me.

• 6:47Tim Ferriss?

  I really appreciate you making the time, and I thought we would just jump into, rather than asking you the 17 questions that you've been asked most often, what I would call rapid-fire questions. Now, all that means is I'm going to attempt, in my sometimes long-winded way, to ask short questions. Your answers don't have to be short. They can be as long as you would like. The first question I wanted to ask, trying to steer away from the most trodden path, is if you had to give a TED Talk on something that you are not known for at all, something that is perhaps an obsession of yours or an interest of yours that people or very few people know about, what would you talk about?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  I was gonna say cooking, which is obviously totally the wrong answer.

• 7:36Tim Ferriss?

  That's the only one on the forbidden list.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  It is sort of this quiet passion, but I happen to have turned it into a career, so we'll let that go. You know, I guess running. I guess it would be running, because I did used to write a little bit about running. And, you know, it's funny, I'm in a down, sort of a down moment in my running life, but I've had those before, and I know that I'll always come back. And it's just, as I age, it's just an interesting thing to keep track of and an interesting thing to note that I, you know, at this point, I think it's 45 years I've been running. So even if I'm not running and I see other people run, it just stimulates my thinking about it.

• 8:18Tim Ferriss?

  And is there any, for instance, I've read a little bit of Haruki Murakami and his running, certainly Malcolm Gladwell, well-known runner. What is it that you get out of running? And did you start really young?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  I started when I was in my twenties. I started as a way to stop smoking cigarettes, which worked. And, you know, I have gotten so much out of running, you know, besides general, I think, overall fitness.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  I was a terrible, I was like the slowest kid in my group of boys when I was growing up. I was almost always the last or second to last one chosen when we were playing games. I was the terrible athlete, the worst runner. And when I started running as a, you know, as a hobby and I, you know, I realized I was never gonna, obviously never gonna be among the fastest people, but I had great endurance. I really enjoyed it. I could get into this spacey head place that I really liked. And I just kept running longer and longer distances. I've run a bunch of marathons. And I think, um, I think it's this combination of fitness and self-worth and then, um,

• 9:33Speaker 01

  the kind of daily, when it's going well, the kind of daily high of just putting your head in a different place and getting tired and feeling good about the way your body feels. Um, that's, you know, when I listen to those things, that's a lot. You can't get that out of a lot. I mean, you can get it out of any daily exercise where it feels like you make progress, I guess, but that for me, um, because I was competitive with myself, um, or even with where I would be in a given year. I mean, I'm never gonna break any of my older personal records, but just to like make progress, it's, it's just something very rewarding about it.

• 10:13Tim Ferriss?

  Very reinforcing. Uh, this is gonna be a left turn, but these are all gonna be left turns. So I guess we'll just end up going in a weird square over and over again.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Right, cool.

• 10:23Tim Ferriss?

  What, what books besides your own have you gifted most to other people?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Um, I don't, you know, I, I have bought, uh, I was gonna say, I buy one-offs. I see a book someone will like and I buy that. I have bought, uh, Bird by Bird by Annie Lamott for a number of people who've told me that they were struggling with writing, because I think it's a really great writing book and it's a good read.

• 10:52Tim Ferriss?

  Fantastic, yeah, fantastic book.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  You know, I, I used to buy Catch Twenty Two for a lot of people, because I just thought if you hadn't read it, you had to, but maybe that era is over. And, you know, I, is there anything else?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  I've bought cookbooks by other people. I've bought Marcela Hazan books for people and Julie Sanni books for people because those are the best, I think, basic Italian and Indian books respectively. Maybe I don't buy a lot of... Like I said, I think it's mostly one-offs. I'll see something I think someone I know will like and just send it.

• 11:27Tim Ferriss?

  So if we're looking at one-offs and continuing in that thread, what purchase, and it doesn't have to be exact, but what purchase of, say, less than a hundred dollars, but something not terribly expensive, comes to mind that has had a significant positive impact on your life? Could be anything.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  The iPhone headset? I don't know, an electric shaver?

• 11:56Tim Ferriss?

  Those are all fair answers. You're saying them like questions. Those are all fair.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  A kilo tin of anchovies? I mean, I think I could probably go on because those are... It's funny to talk about purchases because I feel like in the past year, talking about books, I was thinking about Amazon, but I dropped Amazon Prime because I felt like I was buying things too easily. I felt like I wasn't thinking about... It's not even really the cost because most stuff is inexpensive or negligible, but it's not like I was buying washing machines on Amazon. If I needed a box of tissues, I might buy a case of tissues,

• 12:42Speaker 01

  that kind of thing. And I just thought I wasn't thinking things through enough, thinking through purchases enough. And then I started to realize how much stuff I had and how easy it would be just as easy to give things away or to go shopping in my closet for clothing or that kind of thing. So in the last year or so, I've become less of a consumer, more thoughtful about this and more thoughtful about how things decline in value. Some things decline in value tremendously the minute you buy them. We think about cars, but if you think about clothing, it's sort of the same thing. And I'm trying to focus purchases

• 13:24Speaker 01

  on stuff that I need and stuff that's higher quality. And that goes especially for food, but...

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Because you do need, you use food up, so you do, you do need to buy that more and more. But um, but it's interesting that I, I basically like six months ago or so, I, I'm, I said I'm going on a three year clothing strike, um, just not gonna buy anything and that hasn't exactly been true, but

• 13:54Speaker 01

  compared to what I was like before, um, you know, it's like if I need something, I needed a rain jacket for a backpacking trip I was going on, I bought it, but I'm not buying things on whims, I'm not buying things because they're quote unquote, nice. It's more like, yeah, I have enough sweatshirts, probably enough sweatshirts for the rest of my life.

• 14:14Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned, did you say a gallon tin of anch- of anchovies?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Kilo.

• 14:19Tim Ferriss?

  Kilo, alright.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, you can buy salted anchovies. Anchovies come in, you know, two ways, they come, or that is preserved anchovies, they come salted or they come packed in oil and if they're salted, um, you then rinse them off and you can um, pack them in oil yourself or not, um, but it's, they keep, they keep really well, you can use a couple at a time, it's a little less expensive, they're pretty high quality generally, they come from Sicily or elsewhere in southern Italy, so, I don't know, that was just an example, I do like that. And it's a nice can, everybody buys the same. One producer that everybody.

• 14:59Tim Ferriss?

  What's the name of the producer?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  I don't know, they're from, it's Sicilian stuff.

• 15:04Tim Ferriss?

  So, the reason I'm asking is that I actually travel with cans of sardines and I was turned on

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:10Tim Ferriss?

  by a, a scientist named Dominic D'Agostino, so, are you just eating them uh, as, as a solo?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, often as a snack, yeah, but what, tell me about that, because I'm curious.

• 15:24Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Dominic D'Agostino, he researches a number of things, but he focuses on metabolism and is more recently focused on exogenous ketones. So these are ketone esters that mimic the physiological state of fasting in some respects, and your brain utilizes ketones very well. So he's looked at how ketones in the dietary state of ketosis, along the lines of, say, an Atkins diet, or if it's induced by fasting, can affect everything from cancer growth, even with very aggressive cancer growth, like glioblastoma, and things

• 16:07Tim Ferriss?

  along those lines. He's done a lot more than that, but he follows a ketogenic diet himself, and I asked him what he had for breakfast, and he said, "Well, I usually have, let's say, a handful of macadamia nuts, some eggs, and a tin of sardines, and a half a tin of canned oysters." And I'd never even, I didn't even know there were such a thing as canned oysters, so I started emulating his breakfast, and I fell in love with these sardines, these Wild Planet sardines.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  I know them, yeah, they're good, they're really great.

• 16:37Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, they're great. Packed in oil, so when I'm traveling, I'll just throw a few of those tins in my checked luggage, and if I find myself in a tight spot where I can't get a breakfast that's acceptable to me, then I'll have that. Have you done any experimentation with fasting?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Five years ago, I fasted for four days. I don't know if you'd count that as experimentation. It was the first sort of political reasons, and it was, it was an interesting experience, but it wasn't really, I don't think, was the kind of experience that you're asking me about.

• 17:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Yeah, it's...

• 17:16Speaker 01

  So I'd like, I mean, this is your podcast, so I want to do what you want to do, but I wouldn't mind continuing this conversation, because it's interesting stuff to me.

• 17:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we can talk about it. The fasting, so there's, I think it's... Sayfried might be the last name, I'd have to look it up, but there are a number of published researchers who believe that as one tool in the toolkit, not a standalone monotherapy at all, that fasting can, among other things, let's just say, using the standard of care chemotherapy or something like that, sensitize cancer cells to the effects of those treatments while also increasing the resilience of normal cells. So I have a friend who is, I think he had stage three cancer, I won't get into specifics because he's a

• 18:03Tim Ferriss?

  private guy, but he fasted for three continuous days prior to his treatments. And while the rest of his cohort, these other people were laid out in bed for a day, he was running 10 miles the next morning. And that could have been placebo, who knows, but there's enough data to support that, that in addition to that, even using fasting prophylactically, you could potentially, and over the age of say 40, everyone has, or most people will have, I should say, precancerous cells in their bodies. And that in and of itself is not a problem if they don't grow out of control. But fasting, extended fasting, let's just

• 18:43Tim Ferriss?

  say, and I think Dominic generally does, say, a five day or five to seven day fast a few times a year, can help to purge those cells that might at a later time metastasize or become a problem. So for, for both sort of philosophical and aesthetic reasons, but also physiological reasons, I've started scheduling regular fasts for myself.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  So what does a fast mean under these circumstances?

• 19:12Tim Ferriss?

  So what a fast means under these circumstances is, a fast is, and I've changed it over time. I did a, I did a distilled water fast, which I actually do not recommend. I do not believe juice fasts are, fit in this paradigm because you will never click over into a ketotic state if you're feeding yourself glucose, or in this case fructose. And For me, I'll tell you exactly what it looks like. It looks like waking up, I will have tea or coffee, so a non-caloric beverage. I will allow myself some fat that could come in the form of coconut oil or pure MCT oil.

• 19:52Tim Ferriss?

  And I am avoiding protein and carbohydrate for the most part. There are a few allowances that I made in the last go around. But generally speaking, I'm having water, tea, or coffee and allowing a small amount of fat each day, particularly in the first few days. And when I say I made some allowances last time around, when I did my water fast, I lost, I want to say about 12 pounds of muscle. It was a very, very large amount of muscle. Because it took me a long time to go from glucose-dependent to fat-adapted. And when you're glucose-dependent, you run out of glycogen, you start breaking down muscle tissue in a process called gluconeogenesis in the liver.

• 20:33Tim Ferriss?

  So the second time around, I did a 10-day fast, or this is maybe the third time, and I got into ketosis very quickly in about 18 hours. And I'm measuring this with a finger prick using a device called the Precision XTRA, XTRA from Abbott Labs. It looks like a glucometer, it is a glucometer. And once I get to about, really over 0.5 millimolars, which is the concentration of ketones in the blood, most people would say that's ketosis. I only feel it when I get to about 1.2, 1.3. But the point being, I got into ketosis very quickly, so I'm already sparing muscle tissue. And I was doing DEXA scans, these body composition scans, every two days or three days

• 21:16Tim Ferriss?

  to keep track of muscle mass and just general composition. I started losing muscle. I started losing muscle, which I did not want to have happen. And I spoke to Dominic, this scientist I mentioned, and he said, "Well, you could try using very, very small amounts of branched-chain amino acids." Very small, though, so we're talking 1.5 grams in the morning. And then on a workout day, if you're going to work out, taking perhaps 2 to 3 grams intra-workout. And I started doing that, and I lost zero muscle tissue over a nine-and-a-half-day fast. And the only protein I was consuming were these, let's just call it 1.5 to... Three and a half grams of branched-chain amino acids per day.

• 22:00Tim Ferriss?

  And I would very occasionally give myself a treat of Nori sheets in olive oil, soaked in olive oil, because it's 10 calories. There's nothing to it, really. It's all fat. And at this point, as a working hypothesis, I've just assumed on some level that if you're avoiding primarily protein and carbohydrates, that the fat, a very, very, very, very ultra-low-calorie ketogenic diet that I then call a fast, probably provokes a lot of the autophagy and cell cleaning and so on that I'm looking for in a fast without being just distilled water.

• 22:43Tim Ferriss?

  Where you get into trouble with distilled water is you're going to be peeling off electrolytes and losing a lot of water. And people end up, and this was consistent when I did my first seven-day fast at a medical clinic, almost everyone had tachycardias, a rapid heart rate at night. They couldn't sleep at all. And when you start to supplement with, let's say, bullion cubes and water, or magnesium, potassium, etc., then you're totally fine and you can sleep. And I think that's a cholinergic response. But there you have it. So that's a big part of my monthly and quarterly scheduling now, though, is the fasting.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Have you written about it at all?

• 23:25Tim Ferriss?

  I have, actually. And I mean, we're certainly here to talk about what you're up to, but my brain...

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm just curious.

• 23:34Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, no, for sure.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  We don't have to just keep...

• 23:36Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no. No, no, I don't mind. I mean, I've had enough caffeine to enjoy talking. But the, my, I mean, I have a brand-new book that's coming out in a few days called Tools of Titans, and one of the longest chapters is on everything I've learned, including my personal routine related to fasting and ketogenic diet. But it's very neglected. I think people think about fixing problems by adding things. This is a very natural instinct. And it's not as common to think about subtracting things and then reintroducing them. And this is perhaps an extreme example, but fasting, you're just removing all the inputs and allowing nature to try to do its work. And you see some really odd things happen.

• 24:21Tim Ferriss?

  A lot of people with joint injuries have them resolve themselves. I can't explain exactly why that's the case, but I've seen it in dozens of cases. It's really odd. Let me ask you, we talked about writing. You brought up Bird by Bird, which completely saved me when I was writing my second book, and I've given it to a lot of friends since. I'd love to talk about your writing process a little bit. How many books at this point have you authored or co-authored?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Twenty.

• 24:50Tim Ferriss?

  God, that's a lot of books.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:53Tim Ferriss?

  It's a lot of books.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  That's the answer. That is the answer, so yeah.

• 24:56Tim Ferriss?

  And you very often seem to write books that are similar to some of mine in the sense that you could bludgeon a mugger to death with some of these books. I mean, there's not small books in all cases. What does your... When you are on deadline, let's just say you're a month out from book deadline, what does your daily routine look like?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  You know, it's really different. Cookbooks are different from other things, or they may be similar to what you do. But with cookbooks, the process, especially the big ones, and there are now five, including the How to Bake Everything, the latest, there are five How to Cook Everything books. Six, if you count the one as the second edition of another. So How to Cook Everything, then a second edition of How to Cook Everything, and How to Cook Vegetarian, How to Cook Everything, the Basics, How to Cook Everything Fast, and now How to Bake Everything. Those are all so big that they're really years-long projects, and a month out from deadline doesn't mean anything, because I tend to submit things in quarters, or halves,

• 26:05Speaker 01

  or whatever, and I'm working on editing the first half while still finishing the second half and so on. I think on a book project like Food Matters, or Vegan Before Six, where there was much more writing, when it was more of a long essay, or novella-length essay.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  I think in the last few weeks, a lot of what's going on is tweaking, tweaking language and trying to make sure that sometimes you read things so many times that you don't realize what's wrong and you need a big chunk of time to get away from it and come back and say, oh, this whole chapter, half the paragraphs should be somewhere else, like it's just not tracking right. And those are only things that you can catch after you've written something and let it rest, or at least for me, after you've written something and let it rest for a while. So I think more interesting than what happens in the last month, maybe what happens in the last six months, and I hope that part of that last six months is

• 27:11Speaker 01

  setting things aside so that I can come back and look at them fresh.

• 27:14Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm. And when you're in the thick of writing, when you are actually in production mode and not stepping away, what does, what does the structure of your day look like?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Well, I'm, I'm about to, I'm hoping in January, maybe I'm hoping in March that I can stall a little bit, but I'm about to enter one of those periods. And, um, I, you know, I'm, I, the, the plan is to get up at four, four thirty and work from, work seriously from five till ten and then let the rest of my day take whatever shape it takes. But I need that, if I'm working, you know, at my most serious level, it has to be in absolute peace and quiet with nothing around and, you know, no email, no phone calls, no, none of that stuff. And the only time I have the discipline to do that is when I first get up in the morning. I read about writers who work late into the night

• 28:10Speaker 01

  and, um, man, that is so not me. So not me.

• 28:15Tim Ferriss?

  And when, when you wake up, what's, what happens besides brushing the teeth and so on? What is the, what is leading up to sitting down to write? And then what is the first thirty minutes look like?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Um, first thirty minutes is coffee. Uh, and then there's sort of a bunch of like knuckle cracking, throat clearing. I might do some email or I might look at the paper or something like that. Just really, it's almost warming up my fingers at the keyboard. And then...

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Often it's rewriting something that I've done the day before, or if there's something hot in my head, it's just spilling it out. And I'm a firm believer, I mean, this is, there's no secrets in bird by bird. Most writers say the same thing. This idea that you have to get, you have to get a lousy draft down before you can do anything good, and that you just need to spill the contents of your brain out onto the, what we'll call the paper, you know, out onto the screen, and, um, and then worry about making it beautiful later. I understand there are some writers who really write a careful sentence at a time, but, um, most writers you talk to, um, feel like there are, there are two different

• 29:34Speaker 01

  kinds of processes. One's, one is kind of a brain dump, and one is this refine, refine, refine.

• 29:41Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, do you sit in front of the computer and clock your five hours no matter what, or is there, uh, have you left yourself a starting point? It's the Hemingway-esque style of stopping kind of mid-paragraph so you know where to start the next day?

• 29:58Speaker 01

  No, I have never done, I've never done that. Um, but, you know, I'm not going to compare myself to Hemingway, but, um, it was a different kind of writing, anyway. But, um, I think that, I, you know, I don't do outlines very well, but sometimes I'll get to a point in writing something where I'll say, okay, here I can see the rest of this chapter, or even the rest of the next few chapters, um, and I'll just make some notes. First this, then you do this, then go do this, then do that. And that's as far, as close to an outline as I get, and, um...

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Uh, I like when that happens, but if it doesn't happen, it just flows. Um, I've, you know, I've never had what people call writer's block. I've had months where I didn't do a lot of writing, but I've never really had to or wanted to write something and not been able to do it. So, um, it, it's usually, you know, I, I don't recall an experience where I'd gotten up in that, when I'd been in that kind of rhythm. And it's funny, it goes back to running in a way. It's, it, when, when you run every day, you just run every day and, um, you don't think about it that much. You get up and maybe you do something, maybe you don't, but at some point early in the

• 31:22Speaker 01

  day, you tie the shoes on and you go out and, and it's kind of the same thing. There might be months where I'm not really writing anything serious, but if I am writing something serious, it's just mostly getting up and doing it.

• 31:38Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned not really having writer's block or not thinking of it much, certainly. Uh, let's, let's talk about failures or mistakes for a second. So how has, how has a failure or an apparent failure in your life set you up for later success? If you can think of any, or do you have a favorite failure of yours that actually ended up being really important to your career or life?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Um, there was a, there was a period where really by my standards, I was a failure and, um, that was because I, I had done a bunch of writing, um, when I was in my early twenties and then, but, um, not really been paid much for it. But then when I started to want to write, when I decided I was going to write for a living, no one was interested in anything that I was writing. And this went on for two or three years. I was back in the mid to late seventies. So, you know, it's a while ago, but in those days, the advice was you, you.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Well, I tried to write fiction, but I didn't think it was very good. Um, so then I was trying to write freelance articles and in those days, the wisdom was you wrote letters to editors and you and you said, here's the story I want to write and then they would politely say, no, thanks, or they would ignore you entirely. And that went on for a long time during which, um, I made a living by being a traveling salesman. I sold photographic equipment. Um, so that and that went on for a while and I, um, I kept trying and trying

• 33:26Speaker 01

  and trying and failing and I, I guess that's failing. I mean, not succeeding anyway. Um, and then, uh, the funny thing is, was that people thought I was a good traveling salesman, but I knew that I was a tra- a terrible traveling salesman because I knew that my heart wasn't in it and I wasn't, I didn't particularly believe in what I was selling. I wasn't that interested in it. I was selling photographic equipment. I might've said that already, forgive me. But I was driving around from store to store saying, you want to buy these tripods? You want to buy these notebooks? You want to buy this? And I didn't really care whether people bought them or not because the marginal income was not all that significant. So,

• 34:10Speaker 01

  um, that is to say, I was making enough money from the job that any additional sale, I made a little more money, but it didn't seem like it was worth killing myself for it. But as I said, I didn't really believe in the product. So there was, there was that. And then I finally sold my first piece and my first piece was a food piece and, um,

• 34:32Tim Ferriss?

  Do you remember what it was about?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, totally. I have it on my wall. Um, I, I was in a karate class, I was in a karate class with a guy named Chris Angerman and, um, Chris, this was in New Haven and Chris was writing theater reviews for the local weekly, but that's not what he did for a living. And I said, how did that happen? And he said, oh, just go talk to George DiStefano. He's the arts editor down there and he'll let you do something. So I went in the next day and I talked to George DiStefano and I said, you know, I could review restaurants better than the people you have reviewing restaurants now. And he said, well, write one and, um,

• 35:11Speaker 01

  And we'll see what happens. And I wrote one, I slaved over it for twenty-four hours and I brought it in and um uh, he really liked it. And I, you know, it's, it's interesting. The date on it is March first nineteen eighty, so it's now, what is that? Thirty, going on thirty-seven years ago. He really liked it and I, I have it on my wall and I, I think it's really good. I'm quite happy about it. Um, so that was my first success and I, and, and the interesting thing after that was that I became a very aggressive salesman of my own stuff.

• 35:46Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Um, I think you can probably relate to that. And I think a lot of, you know, entrepreneurial writers can relate to that, which is, we have to go out there and say, you wanna buy this book, you wanna buy this article, da-da-da-da, because I'm gonna say it in a way others haven't and it's an interesting topic and I'll do a good job, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, I've done, I've made my living doing that for, since then. Um, and I've had setbacks and I, you know, some years are better than others and so on, but I do believe that I'm a good writer and, and obviously I've learned a, a lot over the years and I've learned tremendous amount about food, which is why if we go back to that first question about what I don't talk about, that I do, there is this kinda

• 36:31Speaker 01

  not, it's not a secret life, but I do cook all the time and I'm always amazed at how both at how much there is to learn and how much I actually have, have learned, how much I know, in modesty aside, how much I know, so, um, I do think there is this way in which that period of seeing that I didn't believe in what I was doing set me up for being excited and being um, assertive, if not aggressive about, once I started doing things that I did believe in what I was doing.

• 37:04Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned that you, people considered you a good salesman of this photographic equipment. Were

• 37:12Tim Ferriss?

  Did any of that get translated over to selling your own work? And I'm just wondering what specifically makes you or one good at selling either of those things? Like, what was it that made you better at selling your ideas or the photographic equipment than some of the other people who were doing the same?

• 37:30Speaker 01

  I think they thought I was good at selling photographic equipment because I was a nice guy and people liked me. I knew how to talk. And actually, I am curious about other people's lives, so I'm really, I mean, it happened here. This was supposed to be an interview of me, and we wound up talking about something you're doing for, you know, for 10 minutes. And I think that's not, that's not a contrivance. I, I'm not that interested in myself. Um, I, I know what's going on in myself, so I, I like to hear other people's stories. And I think I've always liked that, and that's being a reporter, and that's being a journalist. And, yeah, I, I think I've always had that, that curiosity.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  And, and that's, um, I think if you show a genuine interest in other people, which I do because I am genuinely interested in other people, they like you.

• 38:24Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  So.

• 38:26Tim Ferriss?

  Do, do you have any quotes that you live your life by or think of often?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  I bet I do, but I can't think of them right now. It's not like I have any, it's not like they're mantras, that's for sure.

• 38:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  But I'm sure that there are things that, you know, I actually, you know, I've said, I've said to my kids, but it's not, maybe I still feel this way, because I am, this writing project that I'm about to take on is a complete and total stretch for me. And, um, I know we'll probably talk about this, but I just started doing a podcast, and that's a stretch for me. So I do think that, um, one thing that I learned, and it's interesting because it goes back to what we were just talking about, but one thing that I have learned is that if you are afraid to fail, then you're not going to succeed, because there, you know, there is no success without failure. And, um, fear of failure keeps people from trying, and then there's no possible success.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Uh, so that's, that's not exactly a mantra. It's something that I know, I know through, and I've, and I've said it to my kids and to other people, and, um...

• 39:39Speaker 01

  I lived my life that way.

• 39:41Tim Ferriss?

  It makes me think of a video that actually had a huge impact on me when I was about 15 years old. It was video of a very, very legendary wrestling coach named Dan Gable in Iowa. And he was doing a post-game analysis on one of the Iowa Hawkeyes, I think it was a dual meet competition. And he was yelling at one of the athletes who got a tie. And he said, "You, you just didn't want to lose. You didn't want to lose because he beat you twice before, and so you got a tie. You never win that way." The idea being like, wanting, wanting not to fail and wanting to win are two very different

• 40:25Tim Ferriss?

  things, right? What, what advice, and this is a cliched question, but sometimes it goes somewhere. What advice would you give, or do you wish you'd received when you were, say, 20, 25, or 30? You can pick, you can pitch, pick whichever, or any time that you needed some advice for that matter.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it is, you said it was a cliche, and it's so, it's so often repeated, and it is so corny. And, but the thing is, my, and my parents never said this to me, but I think they telegraphed it to me despite themselves and despite the way they lived their own lives. And, you know, that's not, we're probably not going to get into that, but, but, um, my parents are funny in that their, their verbal cues, I don't know where to go with this. Okay. So, I, I do think that there are ways in which my parents taught me things that were very unintentional on their part, had very little to do with how they lived their own lives, and even what they believed.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  And yet somehow, there were messages that I managed to absorb. Now, maybe I didn't absorb them from my parents at all, maybe I absorbed them from elsewhere. But anyway, um, I, you know, it's the, it's the follow your passion thing. I think you have to do what it is you think you want to do, because you're not going to succeed at stuff that you don't want to do.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  So I wasn't, I was passionate about food in the cooking sense. It wasn't that I ever thought, oh, I'm gonna write about food. It was that I thought, I'm gonna write and I really like cooking. And those two things together really worked for me. And I didn't sit around saying, oh, I'm passionate about this, this is what I must do. Those are just the things that I felt that I wanted to do. Um, and I don't know, I could have, things could have worked out in my life in much different ways, of course. And they might have worked out better, they might have worked out worse. But these were things that I was, that I wanted to do and wanted to have as part of my life.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  And I think that's, that's the advice I say to people all the time. They say, what should I do? It's really like, what is you wanna do? Because that's, that's what you gotta know.

• 42:48Tim Ferriss?

  What, I don't know if you had any external input or pressure or, uh, advice given to you, but if you hadn't listened to that, if you had listened to other people, what do you think you would have ended up doing? Or where would you be?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  My parents would have loved it if I was a doctor. So the thing is that I, um, when I was young, I felt like there were so many options of things to do that it was impossible to decide which one was gonna be the right path. So to decide in high school, which is sort of what it would have taken or, or early in college to become a doctor, it just seemed way too early. But to say I'm gonna be a writer was so vague and meaningless that it left every door open. And it was only later that I realized every time you say yes to something, you've said no to many, many other things. Not every other thing, but anytime you make a commitment,

• 43:48Speaker 01

  you're making commitment in a direction and it seals off other directions at least for that, for that moment. And, um,

• 43:59Speaker 01

  That's an important lesson also is that it's not only the things that you say no to um that shut down certain avenues, it's what you say yes to because if you say yes to something that you're not going to enter into wholeheartedly, you're still going to take time, which is, you know, I guess we could say the most precious thing we have, and devote it to that that path, which means you're not giving time to another path. So, you know, if you're and and it can, these can be daily decisions or these can be life decisions. If you're watching TV, you're not exercising. If you're cooking, you're not sleeping. I mean, whatever it is, you you say yes to something, you say you're saying

• 44:42Speaker 01

  no to something else. And then in the long run, if you're if you are seventeen years old and you say, I'm going to be a doctor, you've just if you stay on that path, you shut off all these other careers. I mean, there are remarkable people who have more than one career, but that's not the norm.

• 44:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I I want to say this is a Steve Jobs quote, but it makes me think of the innovation is saying no to a thousand things. But it's like, as you pointed out, it's also saying yes to, I guess this is echoing a friend of mine who's been on the podcast named Derek Sivers is an entrepreneur, but the saying yes only to the hell yes, a hundred percent in options and not to the that could be kind of cool options because those you will you will drown yourself in these mediocre commitments. And as you as you put it, it displaces the opportunity to do these things that you actually care about. What did how old are you now, Mark?

• 45:41Speaker 01

  I'm going to be sixty seven in February.

• 45:43Tim Ferriss?

  So if we had your, let's say your eighty year old self just poof appeared on the couch, what did

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Right, not that far away.

• 45:53Tim Ferriss?

  Not that far away. So what would your eighty year old, what what advice do you think your eighty year old self would give your current self?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  That's great. Um, well, I guess I could say the kind of advice that I'd like the eight, my eighty year old self to give my current self. Uh, yeah, I would think it, I would hope that it would be, you know, don't age too fast, or don't write things off too quickly. Um, keep changing, keep struggling to do newer, better, more exciting things. And, and, you know, don't be afraid to jump off metaphorical cliffs.

• 46:34Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Um, and that, and that is, you know, what I'd really hated is if my eighty year old self was saying to me now, "You should be much more conservative in the way you're living. You should take far fewer chances," you know, that kind of, I don't want that.

• 46:50Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm. And you said, "Don't write things off too quickly." Could you elaborate on that, or give us an example?

• 46:57Speaker 01

  There are, there are projects, there are things that seem too hard at first, and then, and then they turn out to be, you know, the fu- the fun thing for me, I don't, and I don't know how many people feel this way, but often the fun thing for me is the steep end of the learning curve. Um, so whether we're talking about the fasting stuff that you were describing before, which is completely new and wild to me, and makes me feel like, "Oh, I'd like to explore that," or we're talking about backpacking, which is something I've taken up recently, and, um, just completely surprised me how much I've liked it. Or Pilates, for

• 47:39Speaker 01

  that matter, same thing. Or backgammon. I mean, all these things that, um, you know, I never thought I'd be interested in, and for one reason or another, I became interested in that. And I love that stuff. I love starting new things, and I love the part of it that's, that, that goes from, "God, I'm completely clueless at this," to, "Well, I've gained some competence in this arena, and isn't that nice?" And that's the, that, to me, is the most fun. Gaining competence, I think, is the, one of the most fun things in life, and, um, something that I hope I can continue to do. And it's funny, because, you know, I gained competence in cooking, for example, a long time ago, but I like getting better and better at it. But some things come and some things go, and, um...

• 48:26Speaker 01

  What they've had in common is that I love that, I love that steep end of the learning curve.

• 48:31Tim Ferriss?

  So why, why start a podcast? And what is the, what is the name of the podcast?

• 48:35Speaker 01

  The podcast is called Get Bitt, for, for better or worse. It's a name we kinda like, we'll see if other people like it. It goes, it goes back in a way to, to why I left the Times. I left the Times because I felt, I left the Times for a variety of reasons, but one of them was that I felt constrained and I felt like I couldn't say anything I wanted to say about any subject um I wanted to tackle. And I thought, well, there are two ways of dealing with this. One is to do a newsletter, um, which I might still do. Um, and the other is, these guys I quite liked came to me and said, would you like to do a podcast?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  And um, it's funny, I hadn't listened to many podcasts. I mean, I'd listened to Serial, like everybody else in the United States, but I hadn't listened to really any sort of personal people telling their stories. And I started to do that and I thought, this is great, these people are able to do whatever they want. And it's not, no one says it has to be thirty minutes and no one says it has to be two hours and um, no one says you can't talk to this guy and no one says you can't do this thing and um, it, it's self-publishing in a way and it's verbal instead of written and I thought that's, that's appealing too.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Cause I, you know, I do like to talk and I like, I like interviews a lot. I mean, I like both ends of interviews and I, and I'm, I'm pretty good at interviewing people and um, so we thought we'd give it a shot and I think three or six months went by and we were, you know, doing samples of this and we were thinking of who might sponsor and how we might organize or whatever. And then at some point I said, we should just do a show. We know it's not gonna cost us that much money or that much time to. Um, to put something together, why don't we do a show? So a bunch of people got together where I'm living, which is up the Hudson River, about fifty miles from New York.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  And it's a, it's a, it's a working farm. And, um, I mean, it's a bigger story than that, but that, that'll do. And, um, my daughter Kate came up with her newborn, at that point, newborn son. And, and, um, uh, two of the producers came. And as it happened, the guy who was doing the story about me for Epicurious came and a couple other people showed up. And for two days, we, we made phone calls and did a, did a couple of interviews. Then we did some walking and golf carting around the farm a little bit and talked about this and that. And we did a bunch of cooking and talked about that. And it was really, really fun.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  Um, and so then they went back, Josh and Mark, who are two of the people I'm working with, went back and edited the hell out of all this. You know, by that time, we probably had six hours of material, edited it down to thirty or forty minutes. And we, we just sort of self-published it last week. You can find it, um, on my website, on the Get Bitt website, and, you know, in the Twitter sphere, whatever. Um, but we were really happy about how it came out. And I loved, I loved the process. It was like, we just did stuff for two days. And Josh mostly was walking around with microphones while we were doing it. And, um, um, yeah, I think it worked out well. So we're gonna, we're pushing ahead. We're gonna go ahead with it.

• 52:07Tim Ferriss?

  Is it Get Bitt with, uh, with two Ts? B I T T? Or B I T?

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Uh, no, B I T T.

• 52:14Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, of course, just making sure.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, my name, right, right.

• 52:17Tim Ferriss?

  The podcasting, yeah, I, I, I've, I've found podcasting so fun as an experimental medium, because as you said, there are no rules, really. Uh, and it just provides you an opportunity also to explore your thoughts in a way, and the thoughts of others that can translate to, at least for me, writing much more clearly later. I'm, I'm, I'm walking through and developing, uh, my thoughts as I'm listening to people and asking questions. Now, you have interviewed a lot of people.

• 52:51Tim Ferriss?

  What are some undervalued questions? Some questions perhaps, whether they're follow-ups or just openers, whatever it might be. What are some questions that you have found very, very helpful or valuable?

• 53:06Speaker 01

  I don't think my answer's gonna make you happy.

• 53:11Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not very happy in general, it's okay.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  I don't think it's gonna give you what you want.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  This is me. I mean, I don't pretend to teach interviewing and actually I tried to teach journalism last year and I felt like I wasn't very good at that either. You know, I think after this hour-long conversation, it's clear that I'm not modest when I don't need to be, but when I recognize something that I'm not good at, I'm happy to talk about that also. And I don't think I'm good about teaching some of the things that I think I do well. But I think that, you know what, maybe you will like this answer because I'm thinking about what's just happened in the course of the last hour. I don't believe in having pat questions for interviews.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  I might have a couple of key things that I want the person I'm interviewing to cover, but I actually think the best interviews are conversations. And that you have to see what the natural conversation is and that you're... Any subject of any interview can give a variety of different interviews. The interviewer has to determine what he or she... If I'm interviewing somebody, I have to figure out what they are doing that's interesting to me and hope that that is interesting to other people also. So, I mean, you can think of anyone you want, but it's most likely that the questions that they most often get are not the most interesting questions. And they're also not the questions that are gonna make them think.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Because if you say to me, "How did you start cooking?", it's a question that I've answered, I mean, literally 200 times.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  So I can't come up with a... Anything I say is gonna sound rehearsed. Whereas if we have a conversation, as we're doing, which is why I realized you are gonna like this answer, if we have a conversation, then I'm taken by surprise by whatever...

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Comes next and I'm forced to actually think and I think that as an interviewer that's what you want to do is get the person you're talking to to actually think.

• 55:30Tim Ferriss?

  I I just thought of maybe a coping strategy for when you get asked that question again. And I I heard that Nick Nolte, this is rumor, but it's been verified a few times that he got so sick of answering the same questions that he would just make up extremely elaborate lies and he would tell.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  No, I went through that. I've done that. I've never done that. It's it's it's satisfying because it's kind of fun, but it doesn't, I mean, and it also forces you to be creative in a way that you might not otherwise be, but um, yeah, who wants to sit around lying all the time? I don't know. It doesn't seem that appealing, really.

• 56:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, certainly it's a headache for the publicist who gets the fact checking call at the end of the day, but let's let's talk about another topic that I I don't think you're aware is actually something that is near and dear to my heart, which is baking. And baking was in fact, the first type of cooking I ever attempted because I was trying in 1999 to follow a ketogenic diet and the the tools and packaged foods and so on that support people are trying to follow an Atkins like diet now did not exist then. And you get so sick of eggs, meat, water, eggs, meat, water, you just want to have something crunchy.

• 57:03Tim Ferriss?

  And the only thing available at the time was pork rinds. And I said, no, I'm sick of pork rinds. I need something crunchy. So I went out and tried to find soy protein powders that might be suitable for baking. I want to make cookies and I'd never made cookies. So I got really into baking and.

• 57:23Tim Ferriss?

  I found it suited my personality, which made sense later when I was talking to somebody at the CIA, not the Central Intelligence Agency, but the Culinary Institute of America.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  The other one, right?

• 57:34Tim Ferriss?

  And I asked how they steered people towards savory or sweet. And they said, "Well, sometimes we'll just ask them, 'Do you like folding your underwear and socks? And if the answer is yes, then we point them towards the baking.'" And I was like, "Okay, well, I don't do that, but I do have a lot of monkish-like tendencies." And baking was really fast. I enjoyed the immediate feedback. What to you makes baking fascinating or fun? What are most people missing who haven't ever attempted to bake something?

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Here's the thing. I don't think that baking is all that different from cooking. And I think the answer to that question goes for cooking as well as baking. And the answer is, you wind up with a finished product that makes you happy in a variety of ways, plus you can eat it. So if baking is your passion, I think maybe you're more interested in the final product having a very specific shape and form that's pleasing to the eye. Because cooking has been a little messier.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  You know, a stew does not have the same aesthetic qualities as a cake or even a cookie. It's sort of more free-form and flowing. I mean, on the other hand, there's nothing more beautiful than an omelet. So cooking can be, of course, as beautiful as baking. But I think that both have that thing in common. You start a project, in a reasonably short period of time, you finish it. It has a lot of wonderful aesthetic qualities, and you get to eat it. And you get to nurture people you care, you know, often you get to nurture people you care about, which is quite an incredible thing.

• 59:30Tim Ferriss?

  So how many pages is How to Bake Everything?

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Hmm, 700 something.

• 59:36Tim Ferriss?

  700, alright. So How to Bake Everything, everything's all-inclusive?

• 59:41Speaker 01

  It's not everything, of course. It's everything I know how to bake, which is a lot, so.

• 59:45Tim Ferriss?

  Which is a lot.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  I don't wanna, I always feel like this title, which has a story of its own, is, um,

• 59:54Speaker 01

  you know, was a bit, a bit tongue-in-cheek at the beginning, but, um,

• 59:59Speaker 01

  I always feel like I have to apologize for it, even though it's obviously not meant to be taken literally. But yeah.

• 1:00:06Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I mean, you're talking to the guy who wrote something called The Four Hour Work Week, which you'd expect, you'd expect, you'd expect to find after the rotisserie chicken, before the spray-on hair at 3:00 in the morning on TV. So, yes, I, I know the feeling. In that book, though, so 700 pages, if you wanted to get somebody hooked on baking, and simultaneously give them a, a dish that would teach them principles that applied to a lot of other dishes, uh, or just great principles for cooking, is there, is there any particular recipe that comes to mind?

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Well, um, it might be a cheat, but I, I would say something like pizza, because, um, it's got cooking and baking in it, so, uh, it's, it's more than, you know, you're making a sauce, which I think is an incredibly valuable thing, and you're learning how to make a dough that incorporates yeast, which is something that can really serve you well. But, uh, you know, I always say, when people say, "How should I start?", I say, "Just pick up a cookbook and, um, find something that really appeals to you. Find something that you want to make, and then take your time and tackle that."

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is what I think. I, I think that, that the best dish for a person to cook first is the dish that appeals to that person most. Um, and that's sort of the way I best know to guarantee, or at least to nearly guarantee success.

• 1:01:39Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm. Well, I think pizza probably hits eighty percent of the population. It checks that box.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  People like pizza, so that's good. Yeah.

• 1:01:47Tim Ferriss?

  And, and I remember, uh, I picked up, uh, is it Marcella or Marcella, Hazan?

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Marcella.

• 1:01:54Tim Ferriss?

  Marcella. Uh, and, and her, her, what is her sort of, uh, her magnum opus? I'm blanking on the name here, but...

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing that she did was, was, uh, me too, classics of, classics, classics of Italian cooking.

• 1:02:12Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. And, and I remember being intimidated, but focusing on the roast chicken. And to this day, I, I think that that is my go-to approach to roasting chickens. And it was just, it was the least intimidating, or one of the less intimidating that I could approach. Uh, and...

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  But you know that people always used to say that you can judge it, you can judge a restaurant best on its roast chicken because it's the hardest thing to make. Now, I don't think that's actually true, but many people think that, you know, making a great roast chicken is actually, and it's true, making a great roast chicken is not easy. Making a decent roast chicken's pretty easy, but making a great one is not easy.

• 1:02:58Tim Ferriss?

  I've heard this say, I've heard the same thing about making a French omelet, that people will say, okay, let's see how you make a French omelet. And that was also one of the litmus tests, I, or one of the, I'm sure, many different tests that people could throw out there. I am not a chef, uh, enjoy cooking, but certainly wouldn't put myself on the line anywhere even half respectable. So, uh, Mark, where can, uh...

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  It's all practice, as you know. Like everything else, it's all practice.

• 1:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  And the more, as you pointed out, the more you enjoy the, whether it's the skill or the dish that you pick out, the more incentivized and motivated you're going to be to practice in the first place. Uh, Mark, where can, uh, I guess, I guess two things. So the first is, we'll wrap up here and I'll let you get running because I know we have a hard out. So the first is, uh, where can people find out more about you and find you on the internet, et cetera? And then last is, if you have any parting ask of my audience or recommendation, could be anything, what would that be?

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Well, those are great questions. Thank you for asking them. I mean, you know, I have a live and well website called markbitman.com. So that's where you can find me most easily. And, um, I'd love people to listen to Get Bitt and, and tell us either on the Get Bitt site or through Twitter, which I'm at bitman, what they think of it. Yeah. And of course I'd love people to check out How to Bake Everything, but that goes without saying. And now I hope that after this conversation, people are curious about it and will check it out. It's obviously a great season for it and it's like everything else I've done. The most accessible possible book I could do.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  So, yeah, those are, those are my two requests, I think.

• 1:04:57Tim Ferriss?

  And it's, it's sitting right in my kitchen next to a bunch of others that are my favorites. Uh, like Seven Fires and some of, some of my, some of my go-tos. So How to Bake Everything has, has a spot in prime real estate right on my, my kitchen shelf. Uh, and Mark, I am sure you'll be doing a lot of cooking coming up on the holidays. So I wish you and yours a very happy holidays. Thank you for making the time.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Great chatting with you Tim. Really a lot of fun. I hope we get to do it again.

• 1:05:29Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, I will be working on my pizza for Cheat Day and

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Excellent.

• 1:05:34Tim Ferriss?

  To everybody listening, as always, you can find the show notes, links to everything we talked about at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And, and until next time, and as always, thank you for listening.

• 1:05:50Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:06:32Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why?

• 1:07:17Tim Ferriss?

  Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. Here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon.

• 1:07:59Tim Ferriss?

  Not a sprint and little things that you may or may not be familiar with like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, etc., can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on the show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different.

• 1:08:44Tim Ferriss?

  I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of.

• 1:09:29Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Vimeo Pro, which is the ideal video hosting platform for entrepreneurs. And in fact, a bunch of my startups already use Vimeo Pro, including Wealthfront, who uses it to explain how Wealthfront works. TaskRabbit uses it to tell their company's story. And there are many other names that you would recognize among their customers, Airbnb, Etsy, etc. Why do they use it? Well, Vimeo Pro provides enterprise-level video hosting for a fraction of the usual cost. Features include gorgeous, high-quality playback with no ads, up to 20 gigabytes of video storage every week, unlimited plays and views, and a fully customizable video player, which can include your logo, custom outro, etc. You also get VIP support. And you get all of For just $1.99 per year.

• 1:10:11Tim Ferriss?

  That's $17 a month with no complicated bandwidth calculations or hidden fees. And you can try it risk-free for 30 days. So check it out. Vimeo.com/business. That's V-I-M-E-O.com/business. And use promo code TIM to get 25% off. That's a special discount just for you guys. So check it out. Vimeo.com/business, promo code TIM.