#110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts

Richard Betts (@yobetts https://twitter.com/yobetts) served as the wine director at The Little Nell https://www.thelittlenell.com/ in Aspen from 2000 to 2008. Much more interesting to me, Richard passed the Court of Master Sommeliers' Masters Exam on his first attempt, becoming the ninth person in history ever to do so. I first met Richard through investing wunderkind Chris Sacca http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/05/30/chris-sacca/, and we immediately hit it off. Richard can help you train your senses for anything, including wine, whiskey, his current love of mezcal, and far beyond. He's also done a lot of wild experiments, got a lot of tattoos, almost been shot in Mexico, and developed an incredible ability to simplify the complex. We get along. In this conversation, we talk about nearly everything, ranging from the value of quitting to tricks of the trade, travel tips (he's traveling 300+ days per year), and "starter" wines. We also drink a boat-load of whiskey, me tasting and Richard teaching. The pictures below show a sample. Side note and cool rule of thumb: did you know it's spelled "whiskey" when from countries that have "e" in their names (e.g. America) but "whisky" when from countries that don't have an "e" in their names (e.g. Scotland, Japan)? Richard taught me that. Last but not least, Richard is the author of a brand-new book, "The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All http://amzn.to/1LQjznx," which is sitting on my kitchen table with whiskey stains all over it. It distils (see what I did there?) a couple of lifetimes worth of study down to 24 pages...then makes them smell good. Definitely check it out http://amzn.to/1LQjznx. At the very least, it gives you a bunch of rules of thumb (like the whiskey vs. whisky trick), so you can impress your friends and not look like a dumb-ass at the bar. Sweet! Less dumb-ass and more smart-ass is always good. Get 'er done. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim. If I'm not going commando, then I'm wearing MeUndies. I've been testing out pairs for about 3 or 4 months now, and, as a result, I've thrown out my other underwear. They look good, feel good, have options for men and women, and their materials are 2x softer than cotton, as evaluated using the Kawabata method. Not only does MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim offer underwear, but they also have incredible lounge pants. I wear them when I record the podcast, and when I'm out and about grabbing coffee. If by some chance you're not happy with the first pair you try on, they'll refund your purchase completely. Check out MeUndies.com/Tim http://meundies.com/tim to see my current faves (some are awesomely ridiculous) and, while you're at it, don't miss lots of hot ladies wearing MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. Get 50% off your order at Athletic Greens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Sir Richard, what did you have for breakfast? I had yogurt with pistachios, some coffee and water. Those once I got to the airport. And I've had some almonds. Good man. More water. Yeah, more water.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:25Tim Ferriss?

  No, we're just in an appropriate time.

• 0:29Speaker 00

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

• 0:40Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by MeUndies. If I'm not going commando, I'm in MeUndies. I have been testing these underwear for three to four months now, pretty much every day. And in fact, throughout a bunch of my other underwear this morning. And on the road, in the house, they are extremely comfortable. They look good, feel good. They are made of micro modal, two times softer than cotton, as scientifically tested using the Kaabata method. Sounds very fancy, of course. And I get a lot of compliments from ladies for these. You don't get diaper butt, you don't get the tired elastic band. They look great and they have underwear for both men and women. Check out meundies.com/tim and you can see everything I've been wearing.

• 1:22Tim Ferriss?

  The ridiculous, the sublime, everything in between, including my favorite, which is called out. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention their lounge pants. This is a new thing and I've been wearing their lounge pants when I record podcasts. I've been wearing them out and about when I'm walking the dog, meeting people for coffee. And they are extremely comfortable, though they're made from the same material as the underwear. But some of them, like the blue ones I have, have pockets so you can walk about without seeming like you're off of your meds and completely crazy. So that is awesome. And if you're not happy with the first pair you try on, I assume that refers to the underwear, they'll refund you completely and you can keep the pair you tried on for free. But if you're that kind of person, you should be ashamed because that's disgusting. MeUndies.com/tim, check it out.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? And my answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body, did not get paid for that, and I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases. If I can't get what I need through whole-food meals throughout the rest of the day. And you can get 50, oh my gosh, 50% off, yes, 50% off if you go to athleticgreens.com/tim. That's athleticgreens.com/tim. Check it out. It's tasty, but more important, it will help you not screw up when you're doing

• 2:54Tim Ferriss?

  your nutritional planning. So for me, it just covers the bases, takes a load off my mind, puts a lot in my body. And check it out, athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 3:07Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, Dachs, Huns, and Malinois. Look that one up. Belgian Malinois. If you want to see a flash of a creature go across your screen and take out a criminal, just look for canine Belgian Malinois on YouTube. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And every episode, as you may know, it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to try to seize out, she's out, I'm not sure if that was English, the habits, the morning routines, the influences, the favorite books, et cetera, that have made them so exceptionally good at what they do. And that ranges from the Arnold Schwarzenegger's of the world, literally, to Jon Favreau, to stand-up comedians, athletes, musicians, chess prodigies, everyone in between.

• 3:51Tim Ferriss?

  And today, we have a tattooed heretic, Richard Betts. He's known for wine and whiskey. Why is that? Well, Richard Betts served as the wine director at The Little Nell, very, very famous spot in Aspen, from 2000 to 2008. But that's not so interesting compared to the next point, which is, Richard passed the Court of Master Sommelier's Master Exam, so becoming a master sommelier, on his very first attempt. And that meant he was only the ninth person in history to do so. And I first met Richard through the investing mastermind, Wunderkind himself, Chris Sacca, who will no doubt be the most successful venture capitalist of all time. If things keep going as we see them moving and I also had him on the podcast.

• 4:35Tim Ferriss?

  And Richard and I hit it off immediately. He can help train your senses for anything, including wine, whiskey, his current obsession of mezcal and far beyond that. He's also done a ton of experimentation, gotten a lot of tattoos, almost been shot in Mexico, and developed along the way an incredibly, incredibly uncanny, a lot of adverbs in this intro, to simplify the complex. So we get along. He's very good at deconstructing and simplifying himself. And in this conversation, we talk about nearly everything imaginable, ranging from the value of quitting. I didn't expect this to be such a big part of his story, but from that to tricks of the trade, meaning related to tasting wine, the test itself, travel tips, because he travels something like

• 5:18Tim Ferriss?

  300 plus days a year, and starter wines, all sorts of things. We also, as we are doing the interview, drank a boatload of whiskey. I taste, he teaches. And I have pictures on the blog post or in the blog post that show you what Richard looks like, what we drank, etc. So that may be a good visual reference for you. So just go to fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, all spelled out, or just go to fourhourworkweek.com and click on podcast and you will find Richard. The whiskeys were amazing. And side note, by the way, maybe you didn't know this, that it's whiskey, W H I S K E Y, when it's from countries that have an E in their names,

• 6:00Tim Ferriss?

  such as America, but it's whiskey, W H I S K Y, without an E, when the country names don't have an E. That is where the origin is of the given whiskey. So Scotland, Japan, that's whiskey without an E. Richard taught me that, among many, many other things. Last but not least, I must say it because I love it and I've already given it out as a gift. Richard is the author of a brand new book, The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All, which is sitting right in front of me with whiskey stains all over it. It distills, see what I did there? A couple lifetimes worth of study down to 24 pages. It's super short. And check it out. At the very least, it gives you a bunch of rules of thumb, like the whiskey whiskey trick with the E versus no E,

• 6:44Tim Ferriss?

  so that you can impress your friends and not look like a dumbass at the bar, which is pretty awesome because less dumbass and more smartass always good. So with that said, and without further ado, some of you have given me shit online for saying, "Without further ado," and then talking for another two minutes like I'm doing right now. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Richard Betts.

• 7:09Tim Ferriss?

  Richard, welcome to the show.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  Thanks, Tim. Good to be here.

• 7:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, man. It's been a little while since we hung out.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Has been.

• 7:15Tim Ferriss?

  And let's start at the beginning for those people who don't know you.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 7:21Tim Ferriss?

  Why wine? How did you get into wine?

• 7:23Speaker 00

  I got into wine because of my 7th grade German teacher, Mrs. Pritchard, and she was a total bitch.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  And I didn't learn anything about German in 7th grade, but I did learn, and sometimes I'm slow to digest a lesson, but I definitely learned that you gotta do what you love. So I walked into class that day and first day of school, I was like, "This lady's intense and I don't like this subject." And I didn't go. And it didn't matter. And that I did know at that time, that it just didn't matter. Like if I don't go to this class, the other class I never went to was typing. Just not doing it. Just not doing it. I had one of those student council hall passes that let you screw off like that, you know, 20 some years ago. But it felt great at the time, felt bad at the time, but, and I didn't understand the larger lesson,

• 8:14Speaker 00

  but it came back to me over time when I went to school, I went to Oxon and did my undergraduate work there and just struggled.

• 8:21Tim Ferriss?

  What did you study undergrad?

• 8:23Speaker 00

  I tried a lot of things. I went with the idea of doing marine biology specifically. And the whole biology department was populated by young kids that didn't really have an interest in biology. They had an interest in going to med school. And when you grade on the curve, that means that intense things happen, like your slides are broken and it's very cutthroat and backstabbing. It's like, this is just anathema to everything that I believe in and how I want to live.

• 8:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  So bailed on that and then had this wild hair that I should study econ. And that was just foolish because that was also boring. So they went to poli sci and ended up with a minor in poli sci. But, and that was interesting. You know, that's kind of how the world turns. And that was, that was cool. But I needed to be outdoors. That was, that's really my compass is being outdoors. I don't think I wore shoes until I was five. And, and so I found my way to the geology school, you know, and it's definitely not rocks for jocks there. That's a, that's a funny thing that should be dispelled at some point.

• 9:20Tim Ferriss?

  Rocks for jocks, meaning an easy way for the jocks to pass like a science rec.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 9:26Tim Ferriss?

  So the lesson then from the German class was you could opt out of things that you disliked?

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Exactly. Totally. You know what? I'm just not doing that. And so geology was great. Got me outside again. Got me out of Los Angeles, which was awesome. I mean, I love LA. I loved being there then. I like being there now. But, you know, I, I need to spend time outdoors. And if you're in the middle of Los Angeles as a student, it's kind of, you know, it's hard to do. So geology was the thing. And then I took a break from it, blew off my senior year. I lived in Italy. All my friends thought I was a nut. It was great.

• 9:59Tim Ferriss?

  And after my own heart. I was on the five-year plan.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Awesome. It was great. Came back finished and I really wanted to do environmental law. That was really a thing. So I thought, well, if I'm not a marine biologist, I want to work to conserve this stuff, you know, how, how do we do this well? And I thought, well, I think one approach could be to speak the language of the scientific community, take that to law school, then speak the language of the legal community and do your job well. So I went and did a graduate thesis in paleo fluvial morphology. So ancient river system makeup is what that translates to.

• 10:32Tim Ferriss?

  What was the second word? Fluvial?

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Fluvial. That's the river part. And it wasn't, it wasn't so much about that topic at hand. It was about digging deep in the scientific method and what it means to be an investigator at that level. And that was great. I did find through that time that the farther you go with it, the smaller the scale at which you investigate. So, you know, I spent a lot of time in a small, dark, hot room with a scanning electron microscope. And this is what I'm in, you know, during the summers, I'm living in Flagstaff, Arizona, which is beautiful. I mean, right next to the Grand Canyon. It's amazing. I didn't see any of it, you know, because you're in the lab. And so that was, that was happening simultaneously. I was clerking in a small firm there. I clerked for, for my senator on Capitol Hill, Dennis DeCincini, from Arizona.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  I clerked at Skadden Arps, which is the world's largest law firm.

• 11:22Tim Ferriss?

  Skaddens, yeah. Big, big, big Kahuna.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Totally. That was when I was in LA. And then when I was in grad school in Flagstaff, I was clerking for a small environmental firm. And I found it didn't matter whether you were doing environmental, or you're doing bankruptcy. It was the same board, like the Monopoly board, making the same motions, you know, past Park Place every time. You just traded the hat for the shoe, or whatever your piece was, you know, it's still the same game.

• 11:49Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  And I found I didn't like the game. And so I was really ripe for this moment. And this is what Brock back, Mrs. Pritchard, in seventh grade, is that at the end of a, of a very long day with that scanning electron microscope, it was, I was about to be thesis defense weekend. It was a couple of days in advance of this moment. I walked out and I was, I was just not feeling it. Thesis was great. I was ready to defend it. And I was supposed to go to law school six weeks later. So I walked out of the lab, I hopped over the fence and ran across what is Route 66 there in Flagstaff to a small restaurant slash wine store. And I walked in and I didn't know anything about wine. I just know that I drank it on the daily in Italy and how much, you know, that meant to me. And I walked

• 12:33Speaker 00

  in and I bought, totally based on sight. And I was like, I kind of recognize that label. And I pull off the shelf and I took it home and I popped the cork and I poured a glass and that first smell, that first smell took me back to a moment that I had lived almost four years earlier when living in Italy. And I remembered a dinner I had had specifically at the Osseria Cinzia Le Bianco. Which is on Borgo San Jacopo in Florence. I remember where I sat and where my companion sat and what she ate and what she wore and what I ate and what the waitress did right and wrong that night. And all that just came rushing back from one smell. And the next day I was describing this experience to a friend, um, really good friend, best friend in life, actually.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Bobby Stuckey, who was getting into food and wine himself. And I said, you know, Bobby, I don't want to go to law school. And I don't want to do the science anymore. I want to do food and wine. He's like, well, you should. I was like, well, then I will. And so I walked back to the firm. I was supposed to be in the legal library at that point on someone's billable hour, which wasn't happening. Um, so I walked back to the firm and I quit. Um, I did defend my thesis because it was that week. Um, but I called law school and said, look, I'm not coming and hopped off the cliff and got into food and wine. And that was, that was a big moment, you know, your parents, everyone has expectations for you. It's like, you know what? I'm just not doing that. It just doesn't feel good.

• 13:48Tim Ferriss?

  Did anyone else in your family have that? That confidence or compunction? My dog is clawing the bottom of her crate, just for, for no discernible reason, for enjoyment, really. Was there anyone else in your family who? Had that ability to switch, to switch gears and to quit, not in such a negative connotation, but in the, in the sense of changing directions. Did you, did you get that from anywhere else?

• 14:16Speaker 00

  You know, I, I has to have come from my parents, I think, but they, they switched gears.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  In, to me, a much more impressive way. They both came from very, very tough places.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Complete poverty, very rough, particularly in my father's case, very nomadic in my mother's case and her large family.

• 14:38Tim Ferriss?

  Where did they grow up?

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Um, my mom all over the eastern seaboard, but, but really, uh, settled in Syracuse and my father in Syracuse. Um, and his dad was a really rough dude. He's, you know, street brawls, nickels in his fist and, you know, drugs, alcohol, all kinds of intense stuff.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  And so they, I mean, they're the people I'm, I'm most proud of to, to come from such intense circumstances like that. Be the first of your families ever to go to, to college and then make your way out west and actually make your way. I mean, that's, that's, they definitely changed relative to what came before them. So heroes in a different way.

• 15:14Tim Ferriss?

  What did your, what did your parents do when you were growing up?

• 15:18Speaker 00

  So my mom, um, Educator and she ran for a long time, something called the Teenage Parent Program, which gave kids an opportunity, if you were pregnant, you could stay in school. They had a daycare facility in the school and this is everything from sixth graders through high school. So, one, you can bring your kids to school, but two, you actually are in school and you graduate and three, you learn how to take care of your kid at the same time. So she really, she kept so many kids in school, which is huge.

• 15:45Tim Ferriss?

  That's huge, yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  She eventually made her way to the University of Arizona and she did her PhD and then ended up as a researcher there at U of A. My dad, biomedical engineer at the university hospital there his whole life.

• 16:01Tim Ferriss?

  So I can see now, I'm skipping ahead in my own mind, but I can see how the biomedical engineer, scientist aspect and the educator aspect tie pretty neatly into a lot of what you do now.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 16:15Tim Ferriss?

  But I'm skipping ahead. I don't want to give away too much of the middle of the movie, so we'll go back to the beginning. So you decide law, thanks but no thanks.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 16:25Tim Ferriss?

  Food and beverage, then what? And how old were you at the time?

• 16:30Speaker 00

  So just finishing grad school in 96, I'm 25 and I always think that I'm somewhat late to the party, you know, like people decide, I'm into food and wine when they're like 18, 17, 16 and you see those very young people into it today and that's great. I'm always slow to make my decision, but when it's made, it happens. And so we moved, I'd just gotten married to my first wife. At the time, we moved to Missoula, Montana, not known as a bastion of grapefruit or wine, no offense if there are any Montanans out there. I've eaten very well there very frequently, but if you want to go learn about this stuff, it's probably not the best place to do it.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  But my first wife had gotten a tenure track job at the University of Montana.

• 17:16Tim Ferriss?

  A what job?

• 17:16Speaker 00

  Tenure track.

• 17:17Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, tenure track, yeah.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, job at the University of Montana.

• 17:19Tim Ferriss?

  Not unlike the legal profession in some ways.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yep, sign up. There it is. Here's your life before you. That's an intense thought. So we moved there and I worked in all kinds of places, but the first place I worked and cooked was I walked into the Red Lion Motor Inn, which in 1996 was for sure the nicest restaurant in town, you know, and it was a motor inn. You park your car in front of your room, that kind of place. So I walked in and there is a master chef, which is a real designation. I think it means you can do all kinds of things, including put on a brunch for like 3,000 people and carve the hell out of a block of ice and turn into a swan or something. But that's a real thing. And I walked in and his name was Hans. And Hans said, "Oh,

• 18:04Speaker 00

  you want to learn to cook, huh? Okay, yeah, sure. Here, hold this." And he puts an egg pan in my hand, a little saute pan. I'm holding it. And he slaps a piece of toast in it and he says, "Flip it." And I flip it. He says, "Great. You're the breakfast cook for the whole hotel."

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Whole hotel. And so we were really working on our super hippie mantra at that time, which meant no car, nothing automated, riding bikes, which is great in the summer, you know, and that's the, that's the big like bait and switch with Montana is that summer's Eden and winter is the opposite.

• 18:39Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  So October came and the sun went away and, you know, then you're on your bike at 4:00 AM in the snow and the bitter cold, pedaling in to open up this huge hotel and cook breakfast for everybody. And it was thrilling. It was, it remains one of my favorite jobs ever. You know, it's a funny point in life when you don't, you don't really have the same stake in things as you do later in life. So it was great. Like, yeah, I'm going to open this thing up. And you have a flat top, you know, like that flat griddle you cook on that's 20 feet long.

• 19:09Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  And you're rocking eight waffle irons and your cooking oven, you know, by the sheet pan in the back. And, you know, while you're doing that, you're stirring oats and getting the whole thing ready just to open up. Then you open that huge line by yourself and the orders start. flooding in and I think I'm a big believer that in the restaurant business you either have the synapse or you don't and doesn't mean you're a good person or a bad person but it does mean you either shouldn't be in the business or you shouldn't be in the business.

• 19:33Tim Ferriss?

  And you mean like back of the house?

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Like boom boom boom boom boom.

• 19:37Tim Ferriss?

  That type of multitasking.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 19:38Tim Ferriss?

  Order.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 19:39Tim Ferriss?

  Sequencing and all that.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Whole thing.

• 19:41Tim Ferriss?

  Timing etc.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a it's a real thing.

• 19:43Tim Ferriss?

  It's tough.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and some people find it thrilling and do it really well and some people find it thrilling and don't do it really well and some people don't find it either, you know. But if if you have that and imagine some of you that are listening do you it's thrilling and I loved it.

• 19:59Tim Ferriss?

  What what is a way that someone who hasn't worked in that type of circumstance? I've worked in restaurants, I worked in restaurants for many summers, but I was never I was never on the line or cooking in the back or anything like that and I was always in front of the house as a busboy or whatnot. Getting abused by patrons, but the you can get that too in the back of the house, but what if someone wanted to try to predict if they would be good in that type of environment? What are characteristics or experiences or traits? That's like if you had to pick someone, if you had to recruit for the back of the house, but you couldn't test them in the back of the house?

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Right, I would I would look for someone who for sure can handle stress. Because everyone around you has the possibility to just totally lose it and if they start freaking out, are you going to freak out with them? And then the whole ship sinks, so so stress management is huge.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  This seems silly, but you gotta be able to deal with the heat, like the physical heat. Later, a few years later, I had a or a year later, I had a different cooking job and standing in front of I was grill air down, which means you work the grill and standing between the grill and the line. I'd have the little pocket thermometer in my my, you know, chef's coat pocket and it'd read 130 degrees all night long. It was a real thing. It's really, really warm in some of these places, so you gotta deal with the heat. You have to deal with the stress, the pressure and keep cool and you have to be able to to multitask. You know, I mean, if you if you get if you're like a myopic thinker, it's not for you. You know, but if you can say I'm doing this, I'm doing this and meanwhile you have all these little timers going off in your head. You know, it probably means you don't sleep well all the time. I'm that guy woke up three times last night just thinking about stuff.

• 21:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  And it doesn't bother me, you know, it just is. So those those would be the three things.

• 21:36Tim Ferriss?

  So you're in Montana biking. Through October snow to open up the line. What did you like about that? I mean, what excited you about that?

• 21:46Speaker 00

  The pace for sure. You know what was really important to me, Tim, is that it was on the job learning. And so before, before I actually got that first job, we got to Montana. I was like, okay, well, I guess I'm going to figure this out. Or am I going to take time off and then go to culinary school? And I was like, you know, I've done a lot of school, right? And I'm kind of done with that.

• 22:05Tim Ferriss?

  A lot of prep.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  A ton of prep. Let's do something. And so I went and talked to a chef. And I said, hey, man, this is what I'm thinking about. Like, I'm either going to like, ask you for a job. Or this was after I was already working at the Red Line Inn. I'm either going to ask you for a job, or I'm thinking about culinary school. And he's like, well, here's the deal. You can come here today and you can ask me for a job. And I'll say, yeah, great. Here are the potatoes. Get peeling. Or you can go to culinary school, spend two more years of your life preparing, spending, you know, 30, 40 grand a year in bills to be there. Then you can come to me and ask me for a job and I'll say, yeah, sure. Here's a, here's a, you know, big pot of potatoes. Get peeling. Same thing.

• 22:43Tim Ferriss?

  Up to you.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, same, same. Like, okay, I'm, I'm pretty good at math. I got this. Where are the potatoes? Let's do it. So that's simple.

• 22:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. And when, when then did the, the, the nectar of the gods? When did the wine enter the picture?

• 23:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I was, um, while in the kitchen, uh, I was always reading about wine. I, I knew that I wanted to do both, cook and work as a sommelier. I thought working in the back of the house made the most sense to start. I do like that self reliance of really learning how to feed yourself and feed others and, you know, make your table warm and interesting. That matters to me. So I started there, but all the while, read, read, read, taste, taste, taste. And, um, I had an early mentor who said, beg, borrow, steal, but taste, taste, taste. And that's, that's the everything. If you don't have. A context, and we'll talk more about that later, but if you don't have a context, you don't, you don't have any framework within which to hold anything together, even to accumulate knowledge. You gotta have a context.

• 23:43Tim Ferriss?

  Context, meaning, uh, like the, like having the letters of the alphabet to spell words, having

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Just like that.

• 23:49Tim Ferriss?

  descriptors that you can only acquire through developing a database of

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Exactly that.

• 23:54Tim Ferriss?

  Different flavors.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  Exactly that. Yeah, I mean, it was actually no different than geology. You only know what sandstone is because it relates to mudstone, and it's more coarse grain. And you know that mudstone is lay mudstone because it's more coarse grain than siltstone. Yeah, so on and so forth. Not to geek out on, but yeah, it's just how things relate to each other. Um, so I was taste, taste, tasting. We left Montana about 11 months later, almost to the day. Um, so we moved there, bought a house, an old house, remodeled it. The sun went away, as I said, and I'm a solar powered kid growing up in the southwest. So that house was sold before the sun came out in May, and we moved to Tucson where I worked for, the second chef I cooked for and really loved, Alan Zeeman, who's, if

• 24:39Speaker 00

  you didn't use a rubber spatula to get the gloss, you know, the intense beef protein that you worked on two days to reduce down from beef bones, if you didn't use a rubber spatula to get that out of the pan, he would dock your paycheck and make you make soap. It was, it was a real learning experience. You made everything. Nothing came in a box. Um, so while I worked for him, that's where I had this Greer and position where you're on the grill and it was 130 degrees all night. It was also that where the waiters had to walk by, and they knew that I was really into wine. So then they started asking questions like, oh, I know, Richard, you know, the wine list, and like, what should I pair with this? What should I pair with that? So I became this sort of de facto volunteer sommelier from the kitchen.

• 25:16Tim Ferriss?

  And had you been, had you been acquiring, uh, tastes up to that point?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Yep. I spending, I mean, still had basically no money. You're earning minimum wage, um, and I spent every dime I could on every bottle of wine I could find. Yeah.

• 25:29Tim Ferriss?

  And so you bought, uh, how did you choose bottles to taste?

• 25:33Speaker 00

  Things I hadn't had before, and areas I wanted to explore. So, um, you know, I don't drink much Chilean wine today, but at that point, I was like, okay, this, people are talking about this. So what is this about? So then it was a deep dive into Chile. Like, how do these, what are these things about? How do they relate to each other? Is this one just an outlier? Or does it, how does it fit in the context of the whole? Really very methodical about that.

• 25:54Tim Ferriss?

  So you thought you then categorized mostly geographically?

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:58Tim Ferriss?

  In the beginning?

• 25:59Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah.

• 26:00Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it makes, I mean, it gives you It gives you at least a plan for starting, right?

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 26:06Tim Ferriss?

  As you can like compartmentalize in an orderly way. So you're not just helter skelter trying capriciously this wine after the next.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And ultimately wine, the intellectual value of wine comes from this idea of terroir. And terroir, it's a French word for this, this notion that everything that makes up the wine, makes up the place that goes into the wine is this idea of terroir. So you should pick up a glass and it should reflect, reflect a place, just like that ordinary bottle of wine.

• 26:33Tim Ferriss?

  Soil, the climate, the atmospheric pressure.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  The pig farm down the road, everything, everything goes in there. And so, I mean, that's what got me into it in the first place. You know, because I picked up that bottle of wine, I didn't know anything about it. But that sensory memory got me to blow off law school, right? So, so I kept on that path like, okay, well, what is it about this place that makes, you know, that's a common thread amongst these wines, be it Merlot or Cabernet or whatever it may be. And, and when you can take that trip in a glass of wine, that, that's the intellectual value. That's the part that matters and how I convince myself I'm getting smarter when I'm drinking.

• 27:06Tim Ferriss?

  And so your, so your waitstaff start asking you questions?

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:10Tim Ferriss?

  And you're on the line.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  I'm on the line, cooking, like do this, do that. And, you know, it was like a free swing because I didn't have to face the guest.

• 27:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you didn't have any consequences.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 27:20Tim Ferriss?

  Practice without consequences. So what, what might a question be that like a waiter would ask? What, what goes with this entree?

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, or hey, you know, you're special tonight, like how, where's the acid at? Like, is it going to work with a Sauvignon Blanc or is it lower acid and I should use Chardonnay? Or hey, I saw you put Sorrel with grapes and, you know, how is that going to work with this? You know, those sorts of things.

• 27:41Tim Ferriss?

  Cool.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:42Tim Ferriss?

  Very cool.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's super cool.

• 27:43Tim Ferriss?

  And then what then?

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Then, um, this was in Tucson and you're like, well, why would you go from Montana to Tucson? Another place that's not necessarily known as a, as a culinarily hot, uh, important hotbed.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  I went to Tucson after going to Portland and San Francisco both, and this is in ninety seven, ninety seven, ninety eight, and I believed in myself and really believe that, you know, in my ability to make a decision, to do something I love, and then when I'm doing it, that I'm going to put everything I have into it. And in my, the best at it, I have no idea, but I know I'll try harder than most. So I went to Portland and it's like, man, there's so many kids getting into the food scene that I'm just gonna have to get in line with these kids. And then I went to San Francisco, same story, like just super expensive to be here, although less than now, but also just huge lines of kids competing for positions. And then there were two, these two chefs that I wanted to

• 28:40Speaker 00

  work for in Tucson, they were actually great, well-regarded on a national level, and nobody wanted to move there to work with them. So it's like, I can get immediate access, supercharge my learning and my path, and I did. So I went to that second chef and I said, hey, man, I wanna, Yannis, I wanna work, work with you. This is why I'm in Arizona. And he said, great, what have you been doing? And I told him how about my work with Al Zeman, the other chef. And he's like, okay, cool. Well, why don't you audition? And so you spend a week auditioning in the kitchen and doing all this different stuff. The end of the week, we sit down in his office and he's like, okay, so I understand you've also been spending time learning about wine. I was like, yeah, yeah, doing this and passed my first Court of Master Sommeliers exam and Your first one? Court of Master Sommeliers. Court of Masters? Court of, exactly, yeah. I like it. Big mouthful. I like that.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Which is a certifying body for sommeliers and it's, there are four exams in the, in the process. And I'd taken the first one while cooking at that first restaurant in Arizona. Mm-hmm. So just so we can, just so we can lay out that for people, what are the four tests? There's an introductory lecture and exam, and that's not a very hard test. But you have to know a little something. If you're a quick learner, you can pick it all up in the lecture. Then there's the certified Oh, so they give you a lecture and then they test you on what's in the lecture? Yeah. Got it. Ideally, you've read something before you get there, or, you know, you have more than a passing interest. But it's a, it's a, that's a course slash exam that's very much meant to inspire. Like, hey, here's the cool world of wine.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  And if you're into it, you're gonna read about it, check it out, build yourself a plan to acquire the knowledge, and then come back and see us for more exams as you go. So, so that's the first one. The second level is the certified exam. Because there's a need- And the organization is called the Court of Masters? Court of Master Sommeliers. Okay, Court of Master Sommeliers, sorry. Yeah. Different than the Master of Wine. Those are, they're two, um, I don't know- Organizations or certifying bodies? Yeah, two certifying bodies. Like Patty and Nowey for diving? That's exactly it. Got it. That's exactly it. Which are you? I am Patty. I'm the other. Yeah. So- This podcast is over now. Done.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  So, anyways, I'd taken the, oh, yeah, right. So, certified exam is the second step. And that was necessary because people were like, oh, I'm a sommelier, I passed the first exam. And just from the court's perspective, and I'm, I'm not intimately involved with it on day-to-day basis, but it, if people are gonna use this as a, this is the standard and I am now this, then we felt like we actually ought to make it a real standard. So, we inserted the, the certified exam where you have to be proficient in certain elements of wine service and champagne service, old decanting wine service, all these sorts of things. So, that's level two. Level three is the advanced exam, which is indeed really, really hard. And it's three days of examination. There's a blind tasting exam where you blind taste six wines. And I don't mean blindfold.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  You just walk into a room and there are six glasses with wine in them and you have no idea what they are until you sit down and get after it. So, six wines in 25 minutes, you know, what are they? How specific do they expect you to get? I, you know, if it's Ridge Litton Springs Zinfandel from 2010, you should come up with, hey, this is Zinfandel, California, North Coast, 2010. You should be, you don't have to say Ridge, but you gotta get- Yeah, you're not that far off. Exactly. Okay. That's one part of the exam. The second part is a theory examination. Anything that you eat, drink, or smoke could be on that exam. That's a written paper. Oh, it's a written paper? Yeah, well, pardon me, multiple choice or in some, in some short essay.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  What would a hypothetical question on that exam look like? There's so many that we all are sworn that we'll never- Oh, I got it. But eat, drink, or smoke, I, not a, not a precise question, I'm just wondering, like, could it be something about-

• 32:28Tim Ferriss?

  Pipes or cigarettes or smoking or?

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, cigars predominantly and that's actually, it's super de-emphasized now and I'm not even sure that there are test questions that deal with it any longer, but at that time, you needed to know that cigar service is actually done from the left side, whereas everything else you've done in that test to that point, wine service, for example, is done from the right side and you know, it's things like that and ring gauges.

• 32:49Tim Ferriss?

  But which is which? Right is?

• 32:51Speaker 00

  Right is wine service, left is cigar service.

• 32:53Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, left is cigar service.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then memorizing ring gauges of cigar sizes and like things that are for me completely worthless, you know, just like the periodic table. I learned it for a moment and I forgot the next day to make room for something different.

• 33:03Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  Same thing about, you know, with cigar ringside.

• 33:06Tim Ferriss?

  And that's the advanced?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Well, that's part two of the advanced.

• 33:10Tim Ferriss?

  That's part two.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  Part three of the advanced is actually service. So you walk into a room filled with master sommeliers, ostensibly it's a restaurant situation, and you go from table to table and perform different tasks that you're asked to do and they're hard and it's a real thing. And it's amazing, actually, but then the fourth and final level is exactly that again, but the volume's cranked all the way up and the theory portion is not written, it's oral.

• 33:38Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  And that's the master sommelier.

• 33:39Tim Ferriss?

  That's the master sommelier test.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Exactly. There are just about 200 of us in the world today.

• 33:46Tim Ferriss?

  And you were the ninth person to pass it on your first attempt?

• 33:49Speaker 00

  I was. It's that, you know, I just got done bagging on my opia when it comes to working in the kitchen, but I definitely had my opia when it came to studying for that test.

• 33:58Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we'll come back to that. So the, so you, you're talking to the chef you wanted to work for all along.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 34:07Tim Ferriss?

  And he's like, so you've been getting into this wine stuff?

• 34:09Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 34:10Tim Ferriss?

  And you give him the replay of having already passed the first level of examination?

• 34:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 34:17Tim Ferriss?

  And then what?

• 34:17Speaker 00

  And he says, okay, you cook well, so do you want to be the sommelier or do you want to cook? I was like, you've never had a sommelier. He's like, exactly right. We're gonna move the restaurant to the foothills and it's be a bigger space. We're gonna have a 10,000 bottle cellar. And someone's gotta fill it and sell it. You wanna do that? And I was like, I absolutely wanna do that. It was incredible first job.

• 34:36Tim Ferriss?

  What a godsend.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was amazing. It was really amazing. And you learn so much when you build your own list and you're responsible for budgets and you work for a chef owner who are, I mean, chef owners are notoriously maniacal.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  I'm friends with a lot of them and it's true, they are.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  So that was an amazing experience. I'd walk in with my order sheet every week, which is, you know, he had this standardized order sheet. This is what I wanna order. This is who it's from. This is how much it costs. This is how many bottles, blah, blah. And it would be so well reasoned. I would have thought out everything and everything would have been researched from a point of view, like, how good is the wine? How well is it gonna age? What if it doesn't sell? What's its trajectory? Does it pair with the food? Our guests asking for these sorts of things. I was totally armed to the hilt. And I'd go in there and I'd hand it to him. He'd slide it across the desk to him. And he'd sit there and put on his reading glasses and look down and pull up a pen and just start crossing things out without even asking questions. It was brutal. It was just brutal.

• 35:29Tim Ferriss?

  Was it mostly pricing based, the, those that got crossed out?

• 35:32Speaker 00

  I think it was, I think I approached that with the wrong philosophy. Like, I went with, this is exactly what we need. And he probably thought I was coming with more, knowing I would get cut down to less. Which is what I ended up doing over time.

• 35:44Tim Ferriss?

  So you learn a lesson. So you learn to negotiate with the chef owner by bringing in a couple of gimmies that you're happy to let go.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Totally, yeah. The real obvious ones. Expensive neon lights on them.

• 35:54Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, and just watch them cross those out.

• 35:56Tim Ferriss?

  When you said, if they don't sell, does that mean just looking at return policies and things like that? Or how you would resell them, how they would age?

• 36:04Speaker 00

  How they would age.

• 36:05Tim Ferriss?

  How they would age.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's really no return policy, you know, in any real way. So, and it's funny, I'll go look at lists now and you'll be like, wow, there's a whole bunch of. You know, 2004 California Sauvignon Blanc, well, that's probably most of those are no good any longer because it's not something that from this particular place is known to age well and someone was enthusiastic for it. They bought a bunch, but in reality, that restaurant only needed two.

• 36:32Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  Or buy one, sell it out, then buy the next one.

• 36:34Tim Ferriss?

  It's like buying 20 avocados at a time.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  That's exactly it. That's exactly it, you know, but if it's something that's meant to age or will improve and actually appreciate, then it's, then it makes some sense to do it. Yeah.

• 36:47Tim Ferriss?

  So you're building this list. You're getting wise to the sort of horse trading that you do with your boss.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 36:55Tim Ferriss?

  What do you, what are the, what other things do you learn in that, in that first experience?

• 37:00Speaker 00

  One of my most humiliating experiences is a sommelier. I mean, I remember the first time, even the table, you know, it was table 110, you walk down the stairs, first one on the left and someone ordered a bottle of Romaneconti Eschezo.

• 37:15Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, can you say that again?

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Romaneconti Eschezo, which today is fantastically expensive. In 1999, or it could have been fall of 98, that was all like $448 on the wine list. And I was trembling. I remember going to the table, my hands were trembling and shaking and, you know, super nervous and, and, you know, since then I've served bottles at 50 grand or a hundred grand. And it's a 50 grand or a hundred grand and that all goes away. But, but it was right, it was not shortly after I sold that very.

• 37:47Tim Ferriss?

  I'd be nervous of a $450 bottle of wine.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that's not where the embarrassment came, but that was the first one. And then it was like a week later, you know, I was on a roll and we were selling these things that, you know, at a real clip, really expensive things. And, and there was an 85 Behringer Special Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa on the table with an 85 Mouton Roll Shield, which is the first growth Bordeaux from France, from the big deal, five big deal chateau in Bordeaux, recognized as one of the great wines in the world. And this guy had a table of six. He ordered both bottles at once. He wanted them served side by side and they were just going to compare and enjoy these things. And so I decant them both and serve them both as he wishes. And then, I don't know, 30 minutes later, I go back to refill and of course I pour the Mouton on top of the Behringer.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  And I'm going, oh, boy, this is gonna be horrible. And he just smiles and laughs and he looks at me and probably knows I have no possibility of paying for this whatsoever. And he couldn't have been more gracious about it. And I thought I was gonna die at that moment. It was for sure. Because, I mean, you combined, how much were both of those combined? More than a thousand bucks. Yeah, that's a lot. It's a lot, yeah. And ninety-nine and young sommelier, it's like, I spent a hundred and sixty-nine dollars on my suit. Yeah, there's my rent for the next four months. Exactly, the whole thing, the whole thing. And he couldn't have been more gracious, which was actually the real lesson. Apart from like paying attention, it was really about, you know, like, what does it mean to be graceful and thoughtful and so on and so forth. So that was, that was an amazing moment.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  I worked at that restaurant until two thousand. And remember the guy who sold me that bottle of wine that changed my life in Flagstaff in grad school? Yeah. Yeah, about thirty minutes ago. But wait, you're talking about the bottle that was across Route sixty-six? Exactly, that one. In the meantime, he'd gone to Aspen and taken the job at the Little Nell, for sure the world's, one of the world's best places to drink wine. What was the name again? The Inn at the Little Nell. The Inn at the Little Nell. Or even just the Nell, as it's currently. N E L L. N E L L, in Aspen, Colorado, right at the base of the mountain, ski in, ski out. It's an amazing spot. Sounds incredible. It's special. So he'd been the sommelier there and he was leaving to go become the sommelier at the French Laundry.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  And said, hey, I'm leaving, you should apply for my job. I was like, of course I'm gonna apply for your job, great. And, you know, huge shoes to fill. I had no idea what it meant to be in Aspen. And, I mean, the caliber of wine drinker at that time is like, it's as big as it can be. It doesn't get any bigger. It's, it's an amazing place. You mean, in terms of the clientele, like sophisticated wine drinkers? Exactly, like way over my head. But I applied for the job and I'm flown to Aspen and we do the whole dance there and I fly and meet the GM. He's in Los Angeles for a day, we meet there, and then the food and beverage director comes to Tucson and. You know, you saved your best suit all week for when she comes in and, and it was great. And I got the job. They probably had no business giving it to me at that time.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  But I got the job as a sommelier slash wine buyer at the Little Nell where I had no budget and had a ton of storage and everybody drinks everything. And we sold a lot of really great.

• 40:53Tim Ferriss?

  You said you had no budget?

• 40:54Speaker 00

  No budget. Buy what you want.

• 40:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I see. Okay. Unlimited budget.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Unlimited budget. There was no one crossing things out across the desk from you. You just had to count it once a month, which is also a reason not to go crazy, but it was outrageous. And it very quickly, I mean, very quickly I realized how big the shoes were I had to fill, which is good. I very much respond to pressure. You know, it's like, if you want to get fit, I sign up for an event, I will run. I don't want to suck.

• 41:22Tim Ferriss?

  What were the pressures? Like, what were some concrete realizations that you had?

• 41:28Speaker 00

  Almost all the guests knew more than I did. And that was intense.

• 41:32Tim Ferriss?

  That's a lot.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  That's huge. And so what that means, like, sleepless nights, read, read, read, read, read, taste, taste, taste, taste.

• 41:38Tim Ferriss?

  Good practice for the master sommelier test.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Exactly. And part of the tasting is I had a healthy education. That's in the place that did have a budget, quote unquote, is an education budget. Open whatever you want. And you have, you know, a certain number of.

• 41:49Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, for tasting?

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you can learn really quickly.

• 41:52Tim Ferriss?

  That's cool.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. That came back to that.

• 41:55Tim Ferriss?

  What is the right way to taste when you're given an opportunity like that? I mean, is there like palate fatigue? Do you have to do, is it just like kind of physical training where it's like you can overdo it?

• 42:06Speaker 00

  You can definitely overdo it. I don't really, I think everybody can overdo it no matter how much you practice at it. There are some, some obvious things like, you know, don't eat jalapenos before you're going to go taste wine. Don't, don't mess up your receptors in any strange way. Similarly, walnuts or artichokes, you know, all those things, walnuts and artichokes contain tannins, which dry out your palate and make, make it feel strange.

• 42:28Tim Ferriss?

  That's very funny considering that. What I just had before we started talking, I know we're going to have a few things to drink in a bit, was iced artichoke tea.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 42:39Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, Ferris.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, here we go. Definitely not a good way to start your wine tasting. So there are a few rules like that, but for the most part, it's the thing that you really have to have is a method. And I spoke earlier about a context, that's half of the program. The other half of the program to do this well is you have to have a method. And by that, I mean, you do the exact same thing every single time.

• 43:04Tim Ferriss?

  It's an experiment.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of this. I have a friend that articulated this. He's a winemaker in California and there's all kinds of fun experimentation, but if you don't control the variables, you know, what do you actually learn? And so Terry waxes on about the importance of data, not dogma. And I love that saying. And so when you have this method, it's really about collecting the data in the same way, every single time. And it's objective, it's not subjective. It doesn't start with, do I like this wine or don't I? That happens when you decide what you're going to put on your table. But when you're trying to learn about wine, it's not about you. It's about doing the same thing every single time and collecting the same observations.

• 43:47Tim Ferriss?

  And you're taking this down in a notebook or something like that?

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 43:50Tim Ferriss?

  So to someone who's listening is like, you know, I'd like to give that a shot.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:54Tim Ferriss?

  How would they go about it potentially?

• 43:55Speaker 00

  So, well, shameless plug is start with buying the Scratch and Sniff Wine Book.

• 44:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's great. And I've read it, I've mentioned it, I've given it as gift to people.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Yep. Within that, it's really a subset of the method that I use to get through the Master Somme Exam. And that's looking at three main areas of wine, and that's fruit, earth and wood. And essentially, those three categories populate almost everything that you're going to smell and therefore taste in wine. So make the same observations every single time. What are the fruit elements I smell? What are the elements that could be imparted by wood if the wine was aged in wood that I smell? What are the earthy elements I smell? And that's the place to start, right? You do it with what you smell and then with what you taste.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Beyond that, you have to make observations on what you see. You know, you talk about color. You talk about visual clues for alcohol levels and all these things lead you to a place.

• 44:50Tim Ferriss?

  Those are visual cues for alcohol levels like legs.

• 44:52Speaker 00

  Legs, exactly. Legs, tears, whatever you want to call it.

• 44:55Tim Ferriss?

  So how does it correspond?

• 44:57Speaker 00

  So the slower the legs fall, the higher the alcohol level.

• 45:01Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  Assuming there's no sugar.

• 45:02Tim Ferriss?

  And those are the, I mean, I'm gonna be blasphemous here, but sacrilegiously, it's the drips. Like if you swirl the wine.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 45:09Tim Ferriss?

  It's the drips down the side of the glass.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yep. From the high point of the liquid, what drips back down to the glass, those are the legs or the tears. And so it seemed counterintuitive to me when I first learned this, like, well, alcohol is thinner than water or the fruit juice. So why, if you have more alcohol, why would it run more slowly? But there's actually this capillary action that pushes it back up the side of the glass. So it's, and plus it's always evaporating, condensing on the sides of the glass. So the more alcohol there is, the slower those tears fall.

• 45:38Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Right? And the reason you want to know that is, if you're gonna be geeked out wine tasters, it talks about a winemaking style. It talks about an origin, right? So in Germany, you'll have thick tears by virtue of the sugar, but not by virtue of the ripeness. It's a cold place, right? Or even, you know, go through the Loire Valley in France and Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Franc and all these very beautiful varietals, but they don't have much alcohol, which is as it should be because it's not a warm place. And you come to California, particularly this year where it's a really a warm place, you're gonna develop riper fruit, which is, you know, riper fruit means more sugar, which means more fruit for the yeasts and more potential alcohol. And once the yeasts eat it and create the alcohol, there it is, right?

• 46:23Tim Ferriss?

  So is that, would that be, for instance, why, and I'm just kind of making this up on the spot, but why you find like a lot of Zinfandels and Malbecs have a high alcohol content?

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 46:36Tim Ferriss?

  These New World wines?

• 46:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 46:38Tim Ferriss?

  What would, if people wanted to try, now, when you're taking this down, let's get, um... Sort of prescriptive on the tasting.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 46:46Tim Ferriss?

  How much, how much wine do you, do you drink it? I know a lot of people spit when you go to like the wineries. Do you drink it? And how do you taste? Like, what's the, you have a bottle of wine.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Pour yourself a glass.

• 46:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Pour yourself a glass. The first thing you do is you, you turn it over sideways and you don't want to spill it out away from you. So tip the glass away from you and look down through the wine against a white background. And that color tells you a lot. So we don't smell color and we don't taste color. It's very important to know that. But color is an, is an indication of the varietal and potentially also the climate. So Pinot Noir should be.

• 47:26Tim Ferriss?

  The varietal meaning.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  The, the type of grape.

• 47:29Tim Ferriss?

  The type of grape. Whether it's Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon Blanc, whatever.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Exactly. So Cabernet Sauvignon is a thin, or pardon me, a thick, dark skinned varietal. So it's going to make a dark skinned red wine. In fact, if you bite any grape that you want to make red wine from in half, it's white in the middle. So all the color in a red wine comes from the skins. So be it is Cabernet is, is thick and dark, you're going to have the resultant thick and dark, or pardon me, dark colored red wine. Whereas Pinot Noir is thinner and lighter in color. And so you're going to have a lighter colored wine. Doesn't have any less flavor, isn't worth less of, you know, your attention or interest. It's just different. So the first thing you want to do is look at that color. And it should give you, if you don't know what the wine is, it'll give you a visual clue. Like if it's light red, don't, don't think about Cabernet, right? Start crossing it off your list.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  It's about deduction.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  But if you know it's Cabernet and it's light red, well, then you might think something's wrong, right? Because that's not a typical color for it. So the first thing you do is you look at it and you look for color and you look for sediment. You know, is there anything solid in there? You look for gases, it bubbling. If it's red and it's bubbling, there's kind of, you know, maybe two or three possibilities on the planet of what it could be. Including things like sparkling Shiraz, which is totally gross and I don't drink. But those visual cues tell you a lot. And then if it starts to brown, if you, if we assume our glass of wine is tipped away from us and we look out to the far northern edge. If it starts to brown, it tells you that potentially it's made in an oxidative style. So the wine saw some oxygen while it was being made, or it's older. And that's

• 49:05Speaker 00

  probably, you know, more common. And let me ask you this. So what happens to an avocado if you cut it and leave it on the counter?

• 49:12Tim Ferriss?

  It oxidizes.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:13Tim Ferriss?

  It's brown.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  It turns brown. Same thing with old bananas, or whatever it is. And so the same thing happens with wine. It's just grapes, right? And so grape juice goes through the same process. It starts to turn brown. So if you see that sort of brickish browning at the edge of the glass, you can start to surmise like, oh, okay, so it's showing signs of oxidation, therefore it's older. Right? And then you do the exercise, you look at the legs or the tears, and you can start to discern like, what's the alcohol level? And so that brings us back to the context. We'll take a quick tangent on that. If you don't, I can look at that and say, okay, those are medium, medium plus viscosity based on how those tears fall. Well, you only know what medium plus viscosity is if you've had all the wines of the world. So that's the context, right?

• 49:56Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  So you gotta have a method, gotta have a context.

• 49:58Tim Ferriss?

  You have to have experienced the extremes.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 50:01Tim Ferriss?

  And the spectrum.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  Right. So for everyone that wants to do this, this is your homework. It means you just have to taste a lot of wine. It's great.

• 50:06Tim Ferriss?

  And do you, do you, now, I've heard, for instance, that, and I want to be corrected if this is not correct, but that you should sort of take the first swish of wine and just rinse your mouth with it, because that's not the, that's not the sip that you want to try to evaluate. Is that necessary? Incorrect?

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Well, it depends. If you just brush your teeth, you know, you should drink a whole glass.

• 50:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  But, um, yeah, it's definitely, first palate impression is, is not necessarily the right one, you know?

• 50:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  So spend some time with it. Before you do that, though, you definitely want to smell it.

• 50:46Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  The things we really taste are sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and if we're fortunate, this idea of umami, this savory Japanese.

• 50:54Tim Ferriss?

  Just had an umami burger last night. I like it.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Very delicious.

• 50:57Tim Ferriss?

  Nice.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  So, um, everything else we think we taste we're actually smelling. And so it makes sense to smell the wine. So when I smell the wine, I always think about This acronym FUE, which stands for fruit, earth and wood. And so you want to smell for those things and force yourself, you know, require diligence to answer all three of those questions. Don't just blow by it. So you might pick up a wine and it's just like, oh my God, strawberries, raspberries, cherries. Great. All right, cool. Let's taste it. Well, what about the earth and the wood? Cause those are two huge pieces that inform the wine, right? They give it that intellectual value and make it complete and make you smart. So, um, always come up with at least three fruits, whatever they are, and use your own, use your own language. There is no wine speak. That's a

• 51:37Tim Ferriss?

  So I guess to, to do that, you probably also have to get into the habit of tasting. I mean, you should taste things that have fruit, earth and wood characteristics.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  Totally. Yep. So, I mean, we can talk about, talk about all kinds of things we can juxtapose to supercharge that process. Um, but you definitely got to do it.

• 51:55Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by juxtapose?

• 51:56Speaker 00

  So if you want to understand, you know, what is earth? Okay. Well, let's buy, you know, Napa Valley Cabernet and compare it to Cabernet from Bordeaux. Right? They're both the same grape, but the place really makes a huge difference. They're likely made in very similar ways. They're aged in the same oak, but it's that soil that gives the Bordeaux the earthy thing that, that'll isolate that for you, right? That's pretty cool.

• 52:19Tim Ferriss?

  So if people wanted to say, get a, a handful of reds and a handful of whites, all of which were very different.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 52:27Tim Ferriss?

  Just to start developing this, what would, uh, what would a few choices be?

• 52:33Speaker 00

  So let's think about three whites by German Riesling, right? There'd be no oak. So that's an example of an oak free wine. It will likely have a little residual sugar, depending on what kind you buy. Um, which is really interesting because you say, oh, I don't like sweet wine. Well, that's, this isn't about you right now. This is about your learning, right? Not about your palate. So, um, what you will learn there is that it's about balance. And so the sugar will be balanced by acidity. It's all about balance in any wine. Um, so you'll also have earth. So in the German wine, you'll have something earthy. You'll have a great example of balance with residual sugar. And you won't have any oak, um, or woody characteristics. And compare that to California Chardonnay, which won't very likely have any earth. Um, it won't. Don't have the same level of sweetness.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  It will have oak, so you can start to say, oh yeah, there's that caramel, there's that vanilla, there's that butterscotch. That's the oak, right? So then you can like put your finger right on that. And then compare to something like, um, you know, maybe French Sauvignon Blanc or even Bordeaux Blanc. So, which is Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon together in a blend, but it speaks of the place Bordeaux. And so you will have oak like the, um, like the California Chardonnay, but you will have earth like the German Riesling. And so you, you have little bits of each one. And when you can triangulate, that's when you start to get really smart. Like, okay, that's the wood. Okay. That's what earth smells like, right?

• 53:55Tim Ferriss?

  When you're removing one element at a time.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 53:58Tim Ferriss?

  Or examining one element at a time. What about for, uh, reds?

• 54:03Speaker 00

  Red, I would, you know, what'd be pretty interesting to do would be, um, well, I'm a big fan of same, as we just chatted about, same varietal from different continent. That can be pretty interesting. If we want to do different varietals, um, you know, do something like Dolcetto from Piedmonte in Italy. There's lots of great.

• 54:21Tim Ferriss?

  So bad at remembering Italian wine names.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  Yep. So Dolcetto is the, the actual, the name of the grape. Um, and unlike most of the wines in Italy, this is actually named for the grape and not the place.

• 54:32Tim Ferriss?

  Not the region.

• 54:32Speaker 00

  Exactly. So, but Dolcetto is most frequently, so it's red wine, but it's most frequently made in stainless steel. Um, or with the absence of new oak. So you'll taste grape and you'll taste place, earth. Um, but you won't taste any influence of wood. And then why don't we, you can even go right next door and, uh, and drink Barbaresco or Barolo. So same region, different grape. So you can identify with what that grape is about. Almost, I mean, 99% of the, the good cases definitely aged in oak. And so you can feel what oak does there and you'll probably find a tie in in terms of the earth, right? So as long as they have like one tether to each other, then, then it makes it really useful to see like, okay, well, what's different?

• 55:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  And then, you know, grab a Zinfandel from, from Napa Valley. And there you'll see like, okay, the alcohol's really different and that, what does that feel like? And oak will be different because it'll be new oak and maybe it'll be American oak, which will taste like dill, you know? So, so all these little things where you just start to triangulate, but you gotta, you gotta keep notes and keep it organized in some way. I actually don't keep notes physically any longer. I just keep it in my head.

• 55:40Tim Ferriss?

  But you did keep physical notes for a long time.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  Oh my God. Stacks and stacks of notebooks. They fell over, they would hurt you. They're not that tall.

• 55:48Tim Ferriss?

  What is, what is one of your favorite Zinfandels? Just out of curiosity, because I tend to like Zinfandels.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have, I have lots of favorites. I love the wines of Turley.

• 55:57Tim Ferriss?

  Sayin?

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Turley.

• 55:59Tim Ferriss?

  Turley.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, T U R L E Y. They're based in Napa. They make Zinfandel from, from all over. And Christina Turley, Larry's Larry Turley who founded it, it's his daughter. She's working with Tegan Pasalacqua to make some of the really, really special Zinfandels from California. And then Ridge is a classic. Paul Draper's been making wine at Ridge for north of 40 years. And it's, it's as blue chip as Zinfandel can get.

• 56:24Tim Ferriss?

  Cool.

• 56:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:26Tim Ferriss?

  What, what are some underrated wines? And to be, I'd love to get as specific as possible. This is for people who are looking to try some wines that perhaps they wouldn't be exposed to, that haven't been sort of overlauded.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 56:41Tim Ferriss?

  What, what are some that you could bring up?

• 56:42Speaker 00

  So Pinot Noir is all the rage, right? It's for sure an overindulged princess. I am, I, there's so much sweet, expensive, unduly expensive Pinot Noir that I look elsewhere, but I look for that same set of characteristics. And I, I call them the S words. Wines that are silky, sexy, supple, soft, things that are full of allure. That, those are wines that appeal to me. And Pinot Noir doesn't have a proprietary right to those, as I describe them, Pinot characteristics. They happen in things like Grenache. In fact, I'm, I'm a huge proponent of Grenache and believe that it's just the warm climate analogy of Pinot Noir. So think about Pinot with just a little extra warmth, a little extra give, but all those same S words. And it's, it's great.

• 57:27Tim Ferriss?

  What would be a specific Grenache that people could try to find online to check out?

• 57:33Speaker 00

  I'm a big fan of Rusden Grenache.

• 57:36Tim Ferriss?

  Rusden.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, R U S D E N.

• 57:38Tim Ferriss?

  Rusden Grenache.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  And they make a Christine's Vineyard Grenache. It's from the Barossa Valley in Australia. I spent a lot of time there. But to me, that Australia is a whole other thing that we could talk about for days, but that wine in particular exhibits so much elegance when Australia maybe as a country is not known for elegance. Ah, he's a good cantaloupe. Exactly. And where everything's sold out.

• 58:03Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, I butchered that, but it's my Kiwis friends, their influence.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  It's something very elegant and it punches way above its weight.

• 58:12Tim Ferriss?

  Very cool. What are some common, and we're going to talk about other things like whiskey and mezcal and all sorts of goodness, but before we get to that, what are some common misconceptions about wine? Or old wives tales, things that annoy you?

• 58:28Speaker 00

  That's an interesting question. Well, the first one is that more expensive is better. That's definitely not true. It's absolutely not true. It's like, it's a supply and demand thing to a large degree. And so, you know, why, and hype, you know, that Mouton that I poured the Behringer on top of, you know, 20 minutes ago, you know, my most embarrassing sommelier moment, that's, you know, on release, maybe 500 euros a bottle in Europe today, before you even get it to America. Why is it that much money? You know, who knows, other than, I mean, they make something like 20,000 cases of it. That's a lot of wine. So why does it cost that much money? Because someone said, hey, this is the best thing in the world and so everybody has to have it.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  But is it really, but is it really worth that?

• 59:15Tim Ferriss?

  Right, it's like fashion.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  It's just like fashion, exactly. And importantly, people, I actually get asked that question a lot. They say, is this wine worth this much money? I say, well, it depends on the individual.

• 59:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a marketplace question, not necessarily a quality question.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  A hundred percent, exactly. And so for someone, it might be worth it and for someone else, it might not be. But more expensive is definitely not better. That's a big thing.

• 59:35Tim Ferriss?

  If somebody wanted to apply a positive constraint to themselves where they couldn't buy wine over X number of dollars.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:46Tim Ferriss?

  And let's say this is somebody who's, you know, not, not poor, but makes $50,000 a year. So they're not extremely wealthy either.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  Yep, super easy to do.

• 59:55Tim Ferriss?

  What is, what is like the sweet spot, right? In, in terms of?

• 59:59Speaker 00

  Between fifteen and twenty bucks.

• 1:00:01Tim Ferriss?

  Fifteen and twenty bucks?

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  Yep. To, to find a bottle of wine for under ten dollars, you probably don't want to drink it.

• 1:00:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  I mean, there are of course exceptions. There's, you know, people get in the weeds, they blow things out, you know, so on and so forth. And so maybe you get a steal every now and again, but as a rule, it's very, very hard to make something for under ten bucks. I mean, you do it by using fermentation tanks that are as large as a city block with mechanically harvested grapes that were mechanically grown in a place that's probably environmentally very bad. I've seen this stuff in, in process and it's, it's gnarly. And you won't have any connection to the land. So between fifteen and twenty bucks, you can actually get real wine from real people. It probably won't come from, you know, the fancy Appalachians, but that's great. I mean, those are always there. Who cares? You know, go explore the margins and learn something and there, there's so many thrills.

• 1:00:51Tim Ferriss?

  What's another wine between say fifteen and twenty? Or in that range that people probably haven't tried that, that you would suggest they give a go?

• 1:01:02Tim Ferriss?

  Like I haven't had much Grenache, so I'm gonna try some more Grenache.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, please do. You can a lot of, get a lot of great Grenache from Spain. Where it's actually, for a long time, the most widely planted red variety in Spain. And so there's just tons of it. Sometimes it goes by the name of Rioja, where it might be in a blend.

• 1:01:18Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, Rio, okay. So Rioja is Grenache?

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  With Tempranillo in a blend.

• 1:01:22Tim Ferriss?

  Interesting. Okay. I really, I'm a big fan of Rioja.

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, you can drink white Rioja too. No one, no one thinks about that. We say Rioja and everyone thinks red. But white Rioja can be great, can be super age worthy, can be very affordable.

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  I drink a lot of, I drink a lot of rosé from the south of France. That's, you know, twelve, fifteen bucks. And I, you know, a new producer I'm really smitten with, uh, from the Loire, um, name is Moss, M-O-S-S-E. The wines are made from the Chenin Blanc grape. They're totally cheap, you know, twenty bucks. And amazing. Really, really, I mean, world-class special. I would drink them before pretty much any white wine from California. For which you could spend three hundred dollars.

• 1:02:00Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Wow.

• 1:02:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Tim Ferriss?

  Very cool. Uh, so I interrupted you though. You're saying, uh, Misconceptions, more expensive is better. And then you said, I want to say you said color.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. So color, that was a real pet peeve of mine is a sommelier. You open the bottle of something and pour the taste and before the taster had even tasted it, be like, oh, that's great, or oh, that's going to be terrible. Completely based on the color. And as we chatted about, you don't smell color and you don't taste color. And color has no bearing on quality at all. So just because it's dark doesn't mean it's going to be good, you know? I'd much rather look at, you know, my beautiful date and smell and taste something beautiful than just be impressed by a big inky glass of whatever.

• 1:02:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  And the only bearing color has is on the, on the actual type of grape, not whether it's good or not.

• 1:02:49Tim Ferriss?

  Bear with me one second. My puppy is eating my documents. The dog is literally eating my homework. One sec.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  Hey cutie, what are you doing?

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  Sorry. No, it's all good. She's really getting amongst it today. It's all good.

• 1:03:03Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So we are, we are still rolling. So we got the color. And what else? I mean, I know you've, you've said before that you think of wine as a grocery.

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15Tim Ferriss?

  Could you elaborate on that?

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. That's, um, that's also born out of that time living in Italy. The table is not set until there's wine upon it. Might come out of a pitcher and poured into a tumbler, but it's always there. Lunch and dinner, it's on the table. And I lived that when I was living there and I actually brought that back and live it now. And so that, that's an idea that isn't a very American idea because we're, we're so new in terms of, of wine drinkers. Uh, as a wine drinking community, we're, we're still so young. But there it's well established, um, for centuries, millennia. Um, and it's that idea that wine ought to be a part of your everyday life. It makes your life better. And so, yes, I have this isn't that wine is a grocery, not a luxury.

• 1:03:59Tim Ferriss?

  And I never, this is embarrassing to admit, but I've been in the Bay Area for 15 years and I didn't become interested in wine until I lived in Argentina for a year.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  Awesome.

• 1:04:08Tim Ferriss?

  And wine was on the table. Every single meal, always. Everyone drank wine at dinner. It was just, that is part of the process. It's like setting the table with a knife and fork.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:04:20Tim Ferriss?

  You put the wine on the table and then came back with a renewed interest in sort of exploring.

• 1:04:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, similar to the Pinot Noir, I feel like Malbec kind of flooded the market. Totally. Became very popular. And as a result, people could get away with sort of murder in terms of low quality and high prices, but they have been exploring more. I just like the really kind of fruity, high alcohol content. Yeah. Chilean and, you know, carbonara's and whatnot. Yep. But you know, you have expanded though, since all of your time in the wine world. And I'm sure there, maybe there are similar languages, like wine is Spanish and whiskey is Portuguese, but we have, we have, we have, we have a bunch of bottles sitting behind me. Should I go grab those? We should. Okay. And six glasses.

• 1:05:08Tim Ferriss?

  And six glasses. Alright, so we're going to pause this and go get a number of things, a number of tools to have alcohol at 11 a.m. in the morning. We'll be right back.

• 1:05:24Tim Ferriss?

  So we're laying out six glasses. I asked what type of glasses and the answer was they really just need to be large enough that you can smell. So, you know, like a sake glass wouldn't be large enough. But I'm using, for those people interested, beakers, because I'm a weirdo and I like to scare people who come over for dinner into thinking that they might be drinking out of something I put urine in previously. They're 250 milliliter Kimax Kimball beakers. And 250 milliliters is exactly one third a bottle of wine, a standard bottle of wine. And I love these glasses. I was first exposed to them at a

• 1:06:04Tim Ferriss?

  place called Flower and Water. And I'm actually an investor and that group's, one of their other restaurants called Central Kitchen in San Francisco, but they, they used beakers and they also use beakers for candles.

• 1:06:20Tim Ferriss?

  And that is, that is, we have a lot of booze laid out in front of us. I'm excited about this. And the, um, the whiskey story, I mean, how did you segue? I'll let you finish this, the last part, because we have six of these.

• 1:06:42Tim Ferriss?

  But I'd love to hear how you segued from wine to whiskey, or if that's always been present.

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  Uh, no, it's definitely a segue. It's, I think of my job as to help people enjoy their lives. And I think we do that by helping people find easy ways to get smart about things, which can then increase their, their enjoyment, frankly. You know, wine was scary. So we write a scratch and sniff wine book that makes it not scary. You know, knock it off the pedestal, make it easy, make it accessible and tell people that it's actually super democratic. It's up to you what's, what's good. It's not up to me. You know, don't, don't drink them because I said to drink it. Drink something because you figured out that you like that, right? That's, that's the key. And so in, in creating that, that book, you create a methodology and, and it's, again, breaking it down to its component pieces.

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  It's just like dissecting a frog, like, okay, where's this, where's this, where's this? And how do they make the thing tick? Um, and we did that with wine. So you understand that it's again, about fruit and earth and wood. And those, those things populate all the smells that you're going to smell. And then you can put them back together in whatever order you want to make what you want, or make what you want to drink, what'll make you happy. And that same methodology applies to whiskey. There are some things to which it doesn't apply, like I don't think it applies very well to beer, particularly with the explosion in craft brewing.

• 1:08:03Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that?

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  Because the place part has been so obscured. And so now with, um, you know, we can make a beer in California. Exactly. Yeah. The origin part. So whereas 10 years ago, I think it really mattered.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  We would say, okay, well, this has to be Belgian because you recognize certain flavors that come from certain yeasts that only happen in this place. But now those yeasts are imported here and there's all kinds of souring techniques and things that people do to really obscure place. So it doesn't, it doesn't apply to beer, but it applies really well to whiskey.

• 1:08:37Tim Ferriss?

  Now whiskey, I'm cheating a little bit here. This is because I know the answer, but I was so excited to see this because I've always felt like a dumbass when trying to write the word whiskey with or without an E at the end.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  It depends on the country of origin. And that's it. So it's a great, it's a great rule. It's W I S K Y. If you, if the whiskey comes from a country that doesn't have an E in the name.

• 1:09:01Tim Ferriss?

  Scotland.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  Scotland. Japan. If it comes from a country and Canada, if it comes from a country with an E in the name, Ireland or America, then it's spelled W H I S K E Y. Pretty cool.

• 1:09:14Tim Ferriss?

  I love that. I love that trick.

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  It's, it's very, very cool.

• 1:09:17Tim Ferriss?

  There's, there's another one. This is, uh, this is just for people like me who are maybe a little slow, perhaps born in a place like Long Island, like I was. I always forget, this may reflect how ill-suited I am to something like a master som test, but I always forget which bread is mine and which water is mine. So I'm stealing bread. I'm drinking other people's drinks. And if you, if you touch your index finger to your thumb on both hands, like you're making an okay symbol, your left hand will make a B. That's bread and your right hand will make a D, which is drink. And that's what I will do under the table sometimes when I'm unsure of which to grab.

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  Tim, I love that. That's super smart.

• 1:09:57Tim Ferriss?

  And then fork, or if you're setting a table, fork, knife, it's the letter of, it's the number of letters. So fork is four letters, left is four letters. So they, they, they fit on the side associated with the number of letters.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 1:10:16Tim Ferriss?

  So, so you're talking about. Whiskey, so a lot of the, so if wine is few, is whiskey also few?

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  It is, fruit, earth and wood. And so, but it, but the fruit in this case isn't fruit as in a grape, it's grain, right? And so, the first thing that affects the outcome of whiskey, I mean, the first thing to know about whiskey is it's just distilled beer. That's it. Like you take beer and you put it in a still and you turn on the heat, not too high, but just high enough so that only the alcohol evaporates, right? Because it evaporates at a lower temperature than water. And then you condense it and you capture that on the other side of this thing and you've separated the alcohol from the water. Genius. It's called distillation. So what we put in at the beginning is just beer. So you make your beer and what do you make the beer from makes a big difference.

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  Predominantly, corn, wheat, rye and malted barley are the, are the four big grain types, cereal, cereal grains that are used to make that beer to become whiskey. In America, corn is king. And now rye is, is sharing the stage as well. But if you're drinking bourbon, it has to be at least 51% corn.

• 1:11:27Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask yet another embarrassing question. What is the difference between bourbon and whiskey? Or is bourbon a subset of whiskey? Is it a regional name for whiskey?

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  It's, so bourbon has a set of laws, has to come from America. It doesn't have to come from Bourbon County, Kentucky, as, as there is a Bourbon County, Kentucky, but we make bourbon all over the country. So it has to come from America. It has to have been made from at least 51% corn. So the balance can be that rye, it can be the wheat, whatever. And it has to be aged in charred new oak barrels. In charred, yeah, so you, you fell a tree, you cut the tree into planks, or in this case, they're called staves. Then you bend them using heat to make a barrel. And then you actually char the inside of the barrel with a flame. And when you do that, it obviously changes its color, but it also pulls out all kinds of flavors and caramelizes

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  things in that tree, which also contribute flavors. So it's that, you know, it's the brown sugar, it's the brown spices like cardamom and cinnamon, it's vanilla, lots of vanilla, butterscotch, all those flavors come from that oak barrel. So if you age it in that barrel and it's made from 51% corn, you did in America, you have bourbon.

• 1:12:37Tim Ferriss?

  That's bourbon.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:12:38Tim Ferriss?

  Cool. So didn't want to interrupt. So the the main options again, can you roll through that? You've got corn.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  Wheat.

• 1:12:44Tim Ferriss?

  Wheat.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  Rye. And malted barley.

• 1:12:46Tim Ferriss?

  Malted barley. What does malted mean?

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  So it means you you sprout it and you know, just like we would eat sprouts, you know, they they sprout the grain and then you arrest that process. So you you kill it essentially with heat. And so they it's a big deal in Scotch production and in Japanese whiskey production as well.

• 1:13:06Tim Ferriss?

  So what is Scotch then?

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  So Scotch is any whiskey that comes from Ireland.

• 1:13:09Tim Ferriss?

  Ah.

• 1:13:10Speaker 00

  Pardon me, Scotland.

• 1:13:11Tim Ferriss?

  Scotland.

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, Scotland. And of course, Irish whiskey coming from Ireland.

• 1:13:14Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Got it. Okay, cool. This is making a lot more sense now because I I've never really felt confident. I think part of it is that I'm usually drunk when I'm trying to have these conversations, but to have a whiskey conversation, which has been actually a handicap for me in some cases because I spend quite a lot of time in Japan.

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Tim Ferriss?

  And they love their whiskey.

• 1:13:34Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 1:13:35Tim Ferriss?

  And well, I mean, it doesn't help that we're also speaking Japanese, but so what are we looking at here? We have.

• 1:13:41Speaker 00

  So we're looking at a bourbon.

• 1:13:43Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  From Jack Daniels. We're looking at E. H. Taylor Rye, which is so whiskey made in America, but rye is predominant grain. We're looking at Jameson, straight up Irish whiskey. We're looking at a Nika Taketsuro seventeen year old Japanese whiskey.

• 1:14:00Tim Ferriss?

  Ooh.

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  Yep. We're looking at Edred Dower, which is a low lower part of the Highlands in Scotland, the region of Scotland whiskey, but mainland Scotland is the key. So Edred Dower, ten year old, and we're looking at Ardberg. Specifically, it's called Oogadall, which is a it's a Scotch made on the island of Isla, which is off the coast. And so very different than mainland Scotland because you're right on the ocean. And so we'll see in these six glasses that the difference that grain contributes and we'll see the different types of oak and what that contributes and then how place really influences the final product.

• 1:14:35Tim Ferriss?

  Cool. I'm going to I'm going to go grab a camera because I want to take a photograph of this for folks before we get into it. Could you please describe or explain the tattoos that you have? Why do you have the tattoos that you have and what are they of?

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  So on my right arm is a dandelion. It's a love note to a woman named Carla Razuski, who I love. More than I've ever loved anybody, actually. I didn't think it was possible. It's great. And she has something very, very similar, very similar dandelion.

• 1:15:06Tim Ferriss?

  Dandelion. Why a dandelion?

• 1:15:07Speaker 00

  You know, it's, I'm a big fan of how a dandelion changes so rapidly through its life. And I love the part where it ends up with a great big shoot. And it actually depends on the wind to disperse its seeds. I think that's just, it's a beautiful, quiet, profound thing that happens.

• 1:15:24Tim Ferriss?

  Poetic.

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really, really pretty.

• 1:15:26Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh...

• 1:15:27Speaker 00

  The left arm, it's a collection of memories and of things that have made me happy over time. And there's Mount Vesuvius, which I had probably the most amazing single day of my life on.

• 1:15:37Tim Ferriss?

  Where is that?

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  It's just off of Naples in central southern Italy. There's a fish on a bun, so think a fish burger and a mermaid and a heart. And that's an ode to a mermaid I fell in love with, Carla. Fell in love with eating fish on a bun sandwiches at the Cup and Saucer Diner on the corner of Canal and Eldridge in Chinatown in Manhattan.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  There's a seashell with some sea critters in it that are from a, um, a story I spun for my daughter called Samuel the Sea Cucumber. And he and his friends managed to travel around the entire globe in a seashell tethered to a piece of seaweed. And we use it as a lesson in geography and in...

• 1:16:23Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, this is a story that you made up or a story that you...

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  That I made up. That's awesome. I would spin it to her every night at bed and so we'd just keep going.

• 1:16:29Tim Ferriss?

  You know, that's how The Princess Bride came to be also.

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 1:16:33Tim Ferriss?

  It was a story that William Goldman would tell his, I think it might have been his daughter or his son, and then eventually put it down.

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  That's awesome. That's really great.

• 1:16:39Tim Ferriss?

  What's the 27?

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  27, born in the 27s. 27 is a lucky number for me and it's over and over and over. It keeps repeating itself. And in this case, the red above the gold are from an apartment that I shared with Carla in Chinatown. And there were actually three 27s on the building where they were just, that was the original address. And then it all got painted over and they stuck another 27 on it. And a hundred years later, it had patina and they stuck another 27 on it. And they were just this beautiful series of 27s. Very cool.

• 1:17:07Tim Ferriss?

  Be nice.

• 1:17:08Speaker 00

  Be nice. It's, you know, it started as a B and it was in there for 10 years all by itself.

• 1:17:14Tim Ferriss?

  Just B E?

• 1:17:15Speaker 00

  No, just, just the letter B. And it was, it was, it's kind of on the inside. So it was a note to self to just be kind, be thoughtful, benevolent, take your time, just be a good guy, you know, and sometimes, you know, I thrash about and, and it's a little remind, note to self.

• 1:17:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:17:30Speaker 00

  Um, and it just grew into be nice and just plain and simple.

• 1:17:35Tim Ferriss?

  What about the safety meeting and what is that?

• 1:17:37Speaker 00

  So.

• 1:17:38Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's some type of mythological creature between the safety and the meeting?

• 1:17:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a dragon off of the Corona bottle.

• 1:17:45Tim Ferriss?

  So what's the story there?

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  It's a shout out to my homies from the little nowhere. We would have safety meetings. If you were, this is like one of the joys of restaurant work. You'd be on the floor and you'd be in the weeds or someone'd be yelling at you about something. And you just look at your favorite waiter and we'd say, safety meeting? And we both knew that meant walk into the kitchen, walk into my white wine cooler, lock the door from the inside, pound a Corona.

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

  Walk back out on the floor and rock service. Period.

• 1:18:14Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing. Safety meeting. I was just talking to someone who shall remain unnamed, uh, but very, very high performer and,

• 1:18:25Tim Ferriss?

  he, he with his friends would have, they'd have some harebrained question that usually had dangerous implications. And they would say, well, let's play, let's find out. And so their code was, let's play the game, let's find out.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  It's so good.

• 1:18:39Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, so I, I interrupted you though, because I was, I wanted to take photos of this for people. And for those people, go to the show notes and you'll get, you'll find links to everything we're talking about, but you'll also find the photographs. So that's just fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and click on podcast. And you'll also see photographs of some of the audio gear that I'm using here. But, um, so I'm excited about this. So what's, what's the next step then?

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  So the next step is you're going to smell the first, which is Jack Daniels bourbon.

• 1:19:06Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  And the second, which is the E H Taylor rye.

• 1:19:09Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:19:10Speaker 00

  Am I, am I looking for anything in particular or just impressions? So the, the real thing here is, okay, so they're both aged in new charred American oak. Now they're both made in America and aged in America. So wooden place are, you know, relatively equal. The big difference is that the, the bourbon is 51% at least corn and the rye is rye. And so when we talk about what are the three things that inform a whiskey? Well, the first one is grain and that's what I want to illustrate for you here. I'm, I'm hopefully you can smell the difference. The rye should be more pungent and spicy. Okay, let's see. One moment, folks.

• 1:19:46Speaker 00

  He's got his nose all the way in that beaker.

• 1:19:49Speaker 00

  This is like golf commentary.

• 1:19:52Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. It's crazy, isn't it? Yeah, it's a huge difference. Yeah. So rye is actually classically, I mean, it's been around forever, but also it's, it's used in a Manhattan. Yeah, it's got a, it's, it has almost like a, uh, more of a paint-like bite to it. Okay, so. Or maybe not paint, maybe it's paint thinner than I'm thinking of, or like a turpentine. You get that varnishy thing with protracted aging in a barrel. So it does take, take that on. So that's a function of, of time. I see. And time. Got it, got it. The spice from the grain itself should also be there and, and you know, it plays in the same, in the same area. When I smell things, I think about it a lot like musical ranges. And so the bass, you know, hangs out down here and there's rich things like chocolate and, you know, the, the vanilla can happen down in there sometimes.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  I have a question. Does it ever take your nose time to warm up? Cause I feel like I just smelled this like the fourth time and I'm getting a lot more from it. A hundred percent. Is that? Okay. Another key would be open your mouth when you smell. Everyone like slams their mouth shut and you actually get less information. That's right. Cause what is it called? The retroactive? Retronasal. Oh damn it, I was so close. But it makes a huge difference. And don't, you know, for those of you listening, don't like take a hard pull on it like you do wine or it'll actually really burn. So with spirits, you can smell really gently. Yeah. The alcohol is. Don't want to give yourself a. The alcohol is. A rye nasal irrigation. Yeah. So I mean, it almost smells like a rye bread. Yeah. Which is so interesting that that actually comes through.

• 1:21:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it does. You're right.

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then this guy, the Jack Daniels, just smells sort of sweet and round and it doesn't have any of that same spice. So that's the first piece, grape. The next piece.

• 1:21:32Tim Ferriss?

  Or grain, in this case.

• 1:21:33Speaker 00

  Pardon me, grain, exactly. Of grape and grain, one of my favorite spots.

• 1:21:36Tim Ferriss?

  That could be your next book title.

• 1:21:39Speaker 00

  It should be. Well, we have to throw agave in there, so succulents. The next is Irish, and so this is Jameson, and just straight Jameson, which is a brand going crazy. But what makes Irish Irish, and I just want you to think about it as it compares to the things before, is that frequently they distill more than twice, three times, and the farther you go with the distillation, or you can even use a column still, which we need not bother ourselves with, the point is the farther you go with the distillation, the more you take out of it, right? So if we start with our beer is 100 liters and we distill it, we end up with, I don't know, what, 30 liters?

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  And if you distill that again, maybe now you're at 15 liters, and you distill it again, and now you're at 7.5 liters.

• 1:22:26Tim Ferriss?

  Is it subsequently removing more of the characteristics that make it unique?

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  That's exactly what it is.

• 1:22:32Tim Ferriss?

  You're getting closer to rubbing alcohol.

• 1:22:34Speaker 00

  That's 100%. You're all over it. Vodka, essentially. So it has nothing to say. It has something to say, but it's not saying it very loudly. So that's a very Irish thing to do.

• 1:22:45Tim Ferriss?

  This is like the Catholic school version.

• 1:22:47Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:22:47Tim Ferriss?

  Spoke one, spoken two.

• 1:22:49Speaker 00

  100%, 100%. So it's, it's, it's, this is where process is a function of place. And so this is typically what happens with the vast majority by volume of Irish whiskey.

• 1:23:00Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any idea why they do that? Because I'm just thinking back to like Ireland, potato famine. Why would they take such a high volume of stuff?

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  And make it smooth.

• 1:23:09Tim Ferriss?

  And make it, well, make it so much smaller also.

• 1:23:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think it was really a matter of what people favored in terms of drinking.

• 1:23:18Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:23:19Speaker 00

  And so it's so different than Scotland, and each of them were competing for the royal favor. You know, what are people going to drink and what's going to be the drink, right? They're very, very different, and they've each enjoyed popularity at different times.

• 1:23:31Tim Ferriss?

  So Jameson, this should bring back some memories for me, because I remember being in Dublin, and this was in, for those of you who've read The Four Hour Workweek, this was in 2000. Late 2004, I had just landed, I was in London, then Ireland was recommended, landed in Dublin, and later they said, "What the hell are you doing in Dublin? You should go to Galway", and that's how I ended up there. But I got really into hurling, and Guinness sponsors the senior nationals and the competition for this. For those who haven't seen hurling, not the puking game, that's also popular in Ireland, but it's the fastest field sport in the world. It's like lacrosse plus baseball with axe handles on a soccer field. It's extremely violent,

• 1:24:16Tim Ferriss?

  fantastic game. But I wanted to take a tour of the Guinness factory as a result. I was just curious. I don't really drink beer. Got on a bus, it was a hop-on, hop-off bus, got to the Guinness factory, or brewery I suppose, massive as you'd imagine, and the line was, this was probably 9:30 in the morning, and the line was just hundreds of people. And I opted out. I was like, no, I don't even really drink beer. If it were easy, I would do it, but no thanks. A few stops later, the Jameson Distillery shows up, and I'm like, "Okay, sure, let's check it out", and I go in and they go, "Okay, well, for later, we're gonna need a few volunteers", and I raise my hand, they pick maybe two or three of us. And later, we have to do a tasting,

• 1:24:57Tim Ferriss?

  but a marathon tasting. And so all of us wander out at like 10 a.m., completely shitfaced drunk.

• 1:25:05Speaker 00

  Awesome.

• 1:25:05Tim Ferriss?

  That was my introduction to Jameson.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 1:25:07Tim Ferriss?

  So should I smell for anything in particular?

• 1:25:10Speaker 00

  I think just relative to the last one. So again, this is like developing your context. And I mean, I have some things that I attribute to Irish whiskey, but I would rather you smell unfettered.

• 1:25:26Tim Ferriss?

  It's very subtle compared to this.

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  Part your lips just a little bit. Yeah, it is subtle, exactly.

• 1:25:32Tim Ferriss?

  God, I'm getting anxious like a school child who feels like he's going to the exam naked.

• 1:25:35Speaker 00

  There's no wrong answer. That's the whole key to this, is that you just use your own vernacular.

• 1:25:41Tim Ferriss?

  I found out that I have a deviated septum on one side of my, in one nostril, which has been like bothering me for years, but I just thought I always had a stuffy nose.

• 1:25:52Tim Ferriss?

  I know that it's it's much understated compared to the other two.

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:25:57Tim Ferriss?

  But I'm not sure.

• 1:26:00Speaker 00

  And so why is vodka so popular? Because it doesn't taste like anything, you know, and you can mix it with things.

• 1:26:04Tim Ferriss?

  You mix it with stuff.

• 1:26:05Speaker 00

  So that subtlety and its amiability make it actually quite popular.

• 1:26:11Tim Ferriss?

  It's very flexible.

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's very flexible, it's very easy to drink. It's a little bit lower proof than the rye I poured you. You know, lower percentage alcohol. So for me, that that comes from the process associated with the place. You keep distilling, you keep taking things out, it has less to say. And to me, it's always kind of grassy, kind of earthy, a little bit of like a honey thing, maybe. But, you know, those are just personal adjectives.

• 1:26:35Tim Ferriss?

  I would have, I mean, have you found, is the nose like

• 1:26:43Tim Ferriss?

  height, meaning like you are born with a certain nose and it's maybe malleable a little bit, but not very? Or is it like muscle mass where you can develop it?

• 1:26:57Speaker 00

  I think it's totally trainable. My dad's a great example. He was like, I can't smell anything. And, you know, her son's getting into wine and now he can smell everything. And it's just, it's like a radio. You just have to tune it in, right? And once you get there, I think it's

• 1:27:09Tim Ferriss?

  Getting so greedy, I'm like my dog, I stuck my nose right into it.

• 1:27:13Speaker 00

  It's, um, you know, when when we're hunter gatherers, we depended on this scent of smell for life. Right? You know, I can eat that or I can't eat that. That's rotten. That's poison, whatever it is. And it's, we don't have to rely on it at all to the same degree. So it's the first of the senses that we tune out.

• 1:27:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:29Speaker 00

  And so when you get into this, it's a matter of just tuning it back in.

• 1:27:32Tim Ferriss?

  I think part of that is the amount and the frequency with which we eat. When I, I've done a number of fasting experiments and for instance, I just fasted, I broke a fast last night. So I fasted for a short fast for me, like 48 hours.

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:27:45Tim Ferriss?

  And your evolutionary biology upgrades your smell immediately. Like whatever brain power is dedicated elsewhere is suddenly harnessed for the nose. It's really interesting.

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  That's super cool.

• 1:27:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, very, very cool. They do that for

• 1:28:02Tim Ferriss?

  Falconry also, I understand, is if they're doing hunting or any type of precision work with falcons, they will starve is a hard word, but they'll restrict their food.

• 1:28:13Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:28:13Tim Ferriss?

  So their senses are sharpened.

• 1:28:15Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 1:28:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:16Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:28:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if you guys want to see something crazy, you can watch falconry in Mongolia where they hunt deer with falcons. So what's, let's see, we were here.

• 1:28:25Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:28:25Tim Ferriss?

  The Jameson.

• 1:28:26Speaker 00

  So we're gonna leave Ireland and we're gonna go to Japan. And so the Japanese model is very much based on the Scotch model, which you're gonna have in the last two glasses. So malted barley, so this is really a single malt, when it's a single malt, or you read that on a bottle, it just means that it's made from malted barley.

• 1:28:42Tim Ferriss?

  No, the Jameson, what are the grains in the Jameson?

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  So barley, wheat, rye.

• 1:28:48Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. No corn, which makes sense.

• 1:28:50Speaker 00

  And you know, there could be corn in here, but it's definitely.

• 1:28:53Tim Ferriss?

  Those are the primary.

• 1:28:53Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:28:54Tim Ferriss?

  And then the Japanese is the malted barley.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  It's malted barley. And so those guys took their cues from Scotland as to how to do this, and they're very much trying to, or tried to emulate what they did in Scotland, but it happens in Japan, so it has, the place factor is a, is a big, big difference. And I always get some, for me, it feels you have a much deeper understanding of Japan than I do, but I, I always find things to be very subtle and very beautiful and very complicated, but not outwardly so.

• 1:29:23Tim Ferriss?

  Right, not ostentatious.

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah. So I love Japanese whiskey.

• 1:29:28Tim Ferriss?

  It smells delicious.

• 1:29:29Speaker 00

  Doesn't it?

• 1:29:29Tim Ferriss?

  It smells very floral to me.

• 1:29:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's it, you're right on it.

• 1:29:32Tim Ferriss?

  Tim's actually a great taster. I appreciate the pat on the podcast your bag, but I got the floral.

• 1:29:40Speaker 00

  So that's, that's.

• 1:29:41Tim Ferriss?

  The Japanese also love barley. So one of my favorite things, a part of the reason that I'm liking this artichoke tea that I'm keeping cold.

• 1:29:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:29:49Tim Ferriss?

  Is I really became a fan of huge fan of barley tea, I think it's barley tea, mugicha.

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  I'm gonna taste this.

• 1:29:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, go for it. There's a tea called mugicha, M U G I, cha is just T, C H A. So it's like, you know, if you have, even in Chinese, it's the same, like wulong cha, cha is the same thing, but the mugicha, they, they use in the summer. And drink cold.

• 1:30:14Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 1:30:15Tim Ferriss?

  So they, their barley is, is used elsewhere in Japan, but I get a very, yeah, you guys should try that out if you have the chance. Uh, or you can try some, some chilled artichoke tea without anything else, but uh, I really like the smell of this. And this is, what is this called again?

• 1:30:30Speaker 00

  So this is from, uh, Nika and it's specifically Taketsuru.

• 1:30:33Tim Ferriss?

  Taketsuru.

• 1:30:34Speaker 00

  And 17 years old.

• 1:30:35Tim Ferriss?

  Taketsuru, that's like, Taketsuru is like a, uh, bamboo crane. I think somebody can correct me here, but suru I think is crane. It might be heron, but take is, uh, uh, I think it's like shi take or no, maybe those are two different, uh, that may like is in the mushroom, but bamboo, that's cool. That's very cool.

• 1:30:54Speaker 00

  It's very cool. Well, that floral thing you hit on and sometimes referred to as old temple in this whole whiskey.

• 1:30:59Tim Ferriss?

  Temple, like incense.

• 1:31:01Speaker 00

  Incense cedar and, and sandalwood.

• 1:31:04Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, what an amazing smell.

• 1:31:05Speaker 00

  Isn't that cool?

• 1:31:06Tim Ferriss?

  That smells really good.

• 1:31:07Speaker 00

  So that's made a whole lot like, this next one is made, Edredour.

• 1:31:13Tim Ferriss?

  What is it called?

• 1:31:13Speaker 00

  Edredour.

• 1:31:14Tim Ferriss?

  How the hell do you spell that?

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  You spell it, E D R A D O U R.

• 1:31:19Tim Ferriss?

  Uh huh, got it.

• 1:31:20Speaker 00

  And so that's from mainland Scotland. So the big variable here is place.

• 1:31:26Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:26Speaker 00

  Right? And so all things being equal, you've got Japan versus mainland Scotland.

• 1:31:34Tim Ferriss?

  Very different.

• 1:31:35Speaker 00

  So different.

• 1:31:36Tim Ferriss?

  Totally different, right? God, you know, I need to smell more things. I need to like follow my puppy around and smell everything or most things, not everything my puppy likes, I'd like.

• 1:31:48Tim Ferriss?

  I'm having a really tough time pinning it down, but it has a very, very particular scent to it. What would you?

• 1:31:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man.

• 1:31:57Speaker 00

  It's fun to poke at it. And then when it, when all of you are smelling, they shouldn't, you shouldn't rush. I, I would say one of the great joys of smelling and tasting things. And if I had to pick one particular moment, um, I, first time I smelled a Rutherford Glen Muscat. So Muscat, dessert wine made in Rutherford Glen, Australia. And I never had one before and I picked it up and I smelled the glass. And immediately I was back in fifth grade after school, running through my grandmother's front door. And she just pulled ginger snaps out of the oven. And that memory, I mean, I was 35 years old when that happened.

• 1:32:28Tim Ferriss?

  It's like, it's like, it's like the Ratatouille in the movie. When Anton Ego eats the Ratatouille.

• 1:32:33Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's so cool. It's so cool. But and so however old each of us are, we have that many years of memory based on smell. And it's so cool to let those just come floating back to you.

• 1:32:43Tim Ferriss?

  I can't pin this down. I want to say it's like a very dark chocolate or something, but.

• 1:32:48Speaker 00

  I, I'm with you.

• 1:32:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I, I, I can't, I can't quite nail it. It's, it's a very familiar smell to me that isn't Scotch. But what would you, I mean, how would you describe this? What descriptors would you use?

• 1:33:00Speaker 00

  For me, this is, this is actually quite rich.

• 1:33:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:02Speaker 00

  And it's, it's actually, it does have this sort of malted milkshake thing, the vanilla part, but it also has a lot of oak on it. So it does have that richness that almost milk, chocolate, caramel, vanilla.

• 1:33:15Tim Ferriss?

  That's it.

• 1:33:16Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, it's pretty round and voluptuous for Scotch.

• 1:33:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's like a milkshake. It has that kind of milkshake type smell to it.

• 1:33:24Speaker 00

  Exactly. So what do they put in the milkshake? Just malt?

• 1:33:27Tim Ferriss?

  That's true. That's right.

• 1:33:28Speaker 00

  From the milkshake that smells like the malt.

• 1:33:31Tim Ferriss?

  That's what I'm associating, right? Because I've had more milkshakes than I have had Scotch.

• 1:33:35Speaker 00

  Isn't it cool?

• 1:33:35Tim Ferriss?

  That is cool. That's super cool.

• 1:33:37Speaker 00

  Okay. So the last glass, same country, Scotland, but now you're out on an island. Where the, the cast, so this is really about place. And so, so same process in terms of, of making this stuff. In terms of distillation and cask aging, but where.

• 1:33:54Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, cask aging.

• 1:33:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. But when you're.

• 1:33:56Tim Ferriss?

  What type of wood are they aging in?

• 1:33:57Speaker 00

  So, great question. Used barrels from Jack Daniels amongst other bourbon producers. And use sherry barrels. So from the south of Spain, use Madeira barrels from the island of Madeira.

• 1:34:08Tim Ferriss?

  And the sherry barrels are made out of what type? Is that also oak?

• 1:34:11Speaker 00

  It's all oak.

• 1:34:11Tim Ferriss?

  It's all oak.

• 1:34:12Speaker 00

  And so if you.

• 1:34:13Tim Ferriss?

  Is there any type of cask aging that is not done in oak?

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's chestnut, which is common in northern Italy, but that's, that's more for wine.

• 1:34:20Tim Ferriss?

  Got it, got it, got it.

• 1:34:21Speaker 00

  Exactly. So these, this all happens by the ocean. So there's the use of peat.

• 1:34:27Tim Ferriss?

  This last one.

• 1:34:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So place matters a lot here because peat is used in a really profound way. So when we malt the barley, right, you're taking the barley, you're getting it wet, you're letting it sprout. And then we halt that sprouting process with heat and the heat comes from burning peat.

• 1:34:45Tim Ferriss?

  In this case.

• 1:34:46Speaker 00

  In this case.

• 1:34:47Tim Ferriss?

  In the last case, on the island.

• 1:34:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:48Tim Ferriss?

  What is, it's a moss, right?

• 1:34:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's essentially a stage short of coal. So it's compressed dead grass, dead moss. And it's a biofuel. And so you cut it out in like bricks of really dark looking adobe almost.

• 1:35:01Tim Ferriss?

  Interesting. So it's like cow dung that you would burn for fuel in Mongolia and eat. Interesting.

• 1:35:07Speaker 00

  So that flavors it. But then also you age these casks by the seaside. Yeah.

• 1:35:16Speaker 00

  I get things like, in addition to smoke, iodine, brine, salty.

• 1:35:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it does have a briny.

• 1:35:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:22Tim Ferriss?

  A briny, uh, briny smell to it.

• 1:35:28Tim Ferriss?

  So different.

• 1:35:29Speaker 00

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:35:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 1:35:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:30Tim Ferriss?

  This is fun, guys. You should definitely do this.

• 1:35:35Speaker 00

  And this is the short strokes with this. So you just put some things next to each other and you can really supercharge your learning since, okay, so what does place do? Well, you've just seen.

• 1:35:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Speaker 00

  What does oak do? Well, you've just seen.

• 1:35:45Tim Ferriss?

  You can treat it like a workout. I mean, you treat it like an actual learning session.

• 1:35:48Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:35:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So you sort of separate the recreation from the learning, even though you can transport the learning then to the enjoyment.

• 1:35:55Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:35:56Tim Ferriss?

  Keep the training separate. So, uh,

• 1:36:00Tim Ferriss?

  what's next?

• 1:36:01Speaker 00

  What's next? Uh, we release a book on this stuff.

• 1:36:06Tim Ferriss?

  What's next as it relates to me with this, this, this plethora of goodness in front of me?

• 1:36:10Speaker 00

  Get drinking.

• 1:36:11Tim Ferriss?

  How would you, now, so I have six of these.

• 1:36:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:36:14Tim Ferriss?

  In front of me. Any particular order?

• 1:36:17Speaker 00

  I would go in the same order that we tasted. Actually, no, I'm going to put the Irish first. It has the least to say. Let's start there.

• 1:36:24Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so you're starting with the lightest.

• 1:36:25Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:36:26Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so this is the Jameson that we're starting.

• 1:36:28Speaker 00

  The Jameson, exactly.

• 1:36:29Tim Ferriss?

  How much, when you're tasting something like this?

• 1:36:32Speaker 00

  Um, you know, just a little bit enough to get it down your throat. I think, um, you know, you see a lot of wine tasting, everyone spits and so on and so forth. And, and you should, I mean, first of all, I want to advocate responsibility. That's important. You gotta, you gotta do what's right for you. But if you're really going to get the information and you have nowhere to go, you gotta swallow a little bit because you feel certain things in certain parts of your mouth.

• 1:36:52Tim Ferriss?

  There are also taste receptors.

• 1:36:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:55Tim Ferriss?

  Outside of the mouth, a lot of people don't realize this and all the way down to the stomach even. Or, I mean, further through the GI process.

• 1:37:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:05Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:37:06Speaker 00

  So it's your first of the day, so you're probably feeling the alcohol.

• 1:37:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:09Speaker 00

  But beyond that, you know, what do you feel?

• 1:37:12Tim Ferriss?

  Oh God, I just feel like I lack the vocabulary here. I'm being, I'm being asked to name musical notes, but I don't know how to read sheet music.

• 1:37:20Speaker 00

  But they don't, you don't read sheet music, use your own vocabulary.

• 1:37:27Tim Ferriss?

  This is like, for those of you who have seen the chess lesson between Josh Waitzkin and myself, it was an extra for the Tim Ferriss experiment. My face, uh, looks about the same right now.

• 1:37:39Tim Ferriss?

  The, I should really have an answer and I don't have an answer.

• 1:37:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. It doesn't really have a lot to say. I mean, it tastes kind of boozy and it tastes kind of thin and there's not a whole lot to it.

• 1:37:48Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's okay. That's pretty much what I would say.

• 1:37:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I don't have a lot more to add to that.

• 1:37:52Speaker 00

  Totally. I mean, you could add ginger ale and maybe make it, I mean, there's nothing wrong with Jameson. But you know, point, point being like, you know, that's why it gets mixed with things.

• 1:38:00Tim Ferriss?

  Got it, got it. Okay.

• 1:38:02Speaker 00

  Jack Daniels.

• 1:38:03Tim Ferriss?

  Jack Daniels. And this is bourbon.

• 1:38:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:38:07Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:38:08Speaker 00

  Back to me. Well.

• 1:38:08Tim Ferriss?

  Corn.

• 1:38:09Speaker 00

  Essentially, it's Tennessee whiskey.

• 1:38:11Tim Ferriss?

  Tennessee whiskey.

• 1:38:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:12Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:38:15Speaker 00

  So what's the difference? That's, this is a question while you're tasting. The difference between Tennessee whiskey and bourbon, um, is that Tennessee whiskey actually does have to come from Tennessee. Um, and it has, if you come from Tennessee, you actually have to go through this other thing called the Lincoln County process where they filter the booze through a 10 foot, uh, column of charcoal. And that just takes out impurities and so it makes it smoother. Right? But essentially the, the Tennessee process, apart from that, that filtering and bourbon are very, very similar.

• 1:38:46Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to say, I think I'm just, I might be pulling rabbits out of a hat here. And I don't even know there are rabbits in the hat. It's a terrible metaphor, but, uh,

• 1:38:58Tim Ferriss?

  I get a more viscous, sort of caramelly type experience.

• 1:39:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:39:06Tim Ferriss?

  Totally different from the Jameson.

• 1:39:08Speaker 00

  That's due to the heavy corn use here, and it's due to the new wood that's used here. So the Jameson doesn't use near the same amount of the charred new barrels that the Jack does. And so it gives it that richness, gives it that viscosity.

• 1:39:22Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm. Now, what about, how would you explain, for instance, I went to Kentucky to visit Drew Curtis, who's a friend of mine at one point. He runs a site called Fark, which, fart.com, which is hilarious and amazing. You should all check it out. And we went, we went through a lot of bourbon and whiskey and whatnot. And I didn't really gel with bourbon until I had Bullet Bourbon. And I have a bunch, you know, kind of behind us in the cabinet, B-U-L-L-E-I-T. And the way that someone explained that to me was it has a higher rye content.

• 1:40:04Tim Ferriss?

  And that's probably why you like it. But if you had to guess or to explain that, what would you say? Like, is it, why did, why was Bullet so much easier for me to drink?

• 1:40:16Speaker 00

  I think it's a, it's a little, I mean, compared to the Jack, what I find somewhat showy. You know, it has a lot of, you know, the volume's turned up on just a couple of things.

• 1:40:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:26Speaker 00

  To me, the volume isn't turned up quite as loud with the Bullet, and there may be more pieces to it. You know, it's almost a little finer, has a little bit more cut on the palate. And I don't mean bludgeon, like, you know, straight punch in the face of flavor. It's just, it's almost more live.

• 1:40:41Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, a little more subdued.

• 1:40:43Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:40:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, got it. So it's like, if you're listening to music and the bass is out of control and shaking your car.

• 1:40:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:40:51Tim Ferriss?

  The rest of it might be fine, but you can't listen to it for very long.

• 1:40:53Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:40:54Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Interesting. Yeah, the Bullet's tasty. I do, I do like the Bullet quite a bit. So let's see, we are on.

• 1:40:59Speaker 00

  The E.H. Taylor rye.

• 1:41:01Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:41:05Speaker 00

  What do you think?

• 1:41:06Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry guys, these silences must be fascinating for you guys. It's, yeah, it's, it's very, it has a lot of bite, so I struggled to.

• 1:41:18Speaker 00

  Ooh, yup, it comes from two things.

• 1:41:20Tim Ferriss?

  It has a lot of bite, so I was really struggling to try to separate the, and this is the one that I said smelled more like turpentine to me. It's, I was struggling to sort of separate that, that like kick in the nuts.

• 1:41:36Speaker 00

  Yup.

• 1:41:37Tim Ferriss?

  From the flavor profile, but I just, I was having trouble, I was having trouble doing it.

• 1:41:42Speaker 00

  Takes practice, practice, practice, practice. So the, the bite comes from, you have 10% more alcohol here than the last one you drank. So for sure you feel that, but also the rye gives it a bite. And they sort of play in the same range. And we were talking about musical ranges, you know, the turpentine can also play in the same range as the rye. They're all high toned aromatics.

• 1:42:01Tim Ferriss?

  What is that? What do you mean by that?

• 1:42:03Speaker 00

  So when I, when I smell, I think about the musical range and, you know, the, the fat notes are the bass.

• 1:42:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:08Speaker 00

  And then there's this mezzo, which everything has, it's kind of, you know, neither here nor there. But the alto tends to be where these, these high toned notes of, of flowers, of spice, something like turpentine. These, it's, it's the stuff that lives up, up high and you can almost physically feel that in your nose when you smell.

• 1:42:27Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, oh yeah, I did. A hundred percent.

• 1:42:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty interesting. And so the rye on the palate plays almost in the same vein as the alcohol that serves to make it spicy and give it cut.

• 1:42:37Tim Ferriss?

  Huh. Now, I was just wondering, there are standardized tests for vision and people have eye checks, checkups, they go to the ophthalmologist or whatever. There are standardized tests for hearing.

• 1:42:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:42:49Tim Ferriss?

  I can't think of any time in my life when I've had my smell tested.

• 1:42:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, unless you faint and they put smelling salts on you.

• 1:42:55Tim Ferriss?

  Do those exist though? I mean, are there standardized smelling ability measurements of any type?

• 1:43:00Speaker 00

  Not that I know of, no.

• 1:43:02Tim Ferriss?

  What the hell's up with that? That's so weird.

• 1:43:04Speaker 00

  You know what? I wouldn't endorse them even if there were. I'm, I'm a big believer in making this thing inclusive, not exclusive.

• 1:43:10Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, understood. But like, for instance, if you wanted to. Not exclusive in the same way like some people say if if you have a mixed dog, you shouldn't try to find out what the breed is because then you'll impose on that dog expectations. And in the same way, if you found out you had a low, I'm interested in not so much to decide if I am a good or a bad smeller, but to be able to track some type of progress. Sure. As a metric.

• 1:43:33Speaker 00

  That's fair, but just, you know, like if you wear glasses, you can never fly a fighter plane. I wouldn't want anyone to feel like they can't be a happy drinker if they, you know, I have a bad nose.

• 1:43:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:43:41Speaker 00

  And they feel condemned to not participate.

• 1:43:43Tim Ferriss?

  Fair enough. I guess it depends on how quirky their nerd-dom is when it comes to metrics and tracking. I have lots of foibles and neuroses, but fortunately, I guess I can, I can get a bad report card and just want to improve it.

• 1:43:55Speaker 00

  Totally, totally.

• 1:43:57Tim Ferriss?

  So this is the Japanese.

• 1:43:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:44:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, hisashi burida ne. That means long time no see, basically. Um, which by the way is from Chinese, actually. It's um, how you'll be yet, which literally means, well, yeah, it's like long time no see. How you'll be yet, uh, which is the same gen as再见, see you again. Uh, all right. So this is the Japanese Taketsuru.

• 1:44:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:44:24Speaker 00

  He's thoughtfully tasting everyone.

• 1:44:30Tim Ferriss?

  That is amazing. That I love that. That's very, it's just very silky. It's not.

• 1:44:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:44:35Tim Ferriss?

  There aren't any kind of rough aspects to it.

• 1:44:39Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 1:44:40Tim Ferriss?

  Like I could just sip that for hours.

• 1:44:42Speaker 00

  Me too, and I do.

• 1:44:43Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:44:43Speaker 00

  It's um.

• 1:44:44Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna write that one down. This is the, what was it? Seventeen year?

• 1:44:47Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:49Tim Ferriss?

  Seventeen year Nika, N I K K A?

• 1:44:51Speaker 00

  Yep. Taketsuru.

• 1:44:52Tim Ferriss?

  Taketsuru. T A K E T S U R U.

• 1:44:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:44:57Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, that's good stuff.

• 1:44:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it comes back to that idea of balance, right? And and use. So like the first four you tasted, or maybe balance in different ways, but I don't think you liked the rye quite as much.

• 1:45:09Tim Ferriss?

  The rye I could, like on the rocks as one drink with some

• 1:45:12Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:45:13Tim Ferriss?

  bros before we play pool, fine.

• 1:45:15Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:45:16Tim Ferriss?

  But I couldn't sit down and nurse that over like hours of a poker game.

• 1:45:19Speaker 00

  Isn't interesting. And then similarly, you might, you might not take the Taketsuru. And make a Manhattan with it like you would.

• 1:45:25Tim Ferriss?

  The rye.

• 1:45:26Speaker 00

  Right. So then you add sweet vermouth, it calms the rye down. You stir it over rocks and temperature calms the rye down. Right. So all these, you know, it's like, where, where's the endpoint for these things? So I'm with you. I'm probably not sipping the EH Taylor rye, you know, very often. Unless I'm around a campfire and that's all there is, but the Takahashi.

• 1:45:43Tim Ferriss?

  The, you know, the, it is really fascinating how,

• 1:45:49Tim Ferriss?

  whether it's the Irish distilling process, the characteristics of the Japanese Scotch, they really match the sort of cultural stereotypes well.

• 1:46:00Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:46:01Tim Ferriss?

  Um, there's a, there's a really, I think it's a fascinating book. There are gems in it, even though uh, some of it may be found very boring to people. It's a short book called Impraise of Shadows. And it's a book on sort of architecture and aesthetics, written by a Japanese fellow, whose name is escaping me right now. I want to say Tanizaki, but I could be making that up. And it just talks about how, for instance, you, uh, people in the West will buy objects from Japan that have uh, gold foil or embroidering and put it in their homes, but it looks gaudy.

• 1:46:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:46:35Tim Ferriss?

  And the reason that was, or the reason that's the case is that Japan in Japanese aesthetic makes use of shadow and darkness more. So they, they compensated for that darkness by having more ornamentation with things like gold.

• 1:46:50Speaker 00

  Smart.

• 1:46:50Tim Ferriss?

  Because you'd be seeing it in low light settings.

• 1:46:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:46:53Tim Ferriss?

  And just the, the whole book is really interesting. It talks about, you know, the, the, uh, he has very strong opinions about, you know, Japanese versus Western toilets and whatnot. It's just, it's, but that type of sensibility, uh, you can detect even in the, even in the Scotch, which is cool.

• 1:47:08Speaker 00

  And it applies to wine too. Same, same parable.

• 1:47:11Tim Ferriss?

  Huh.

• 1:47:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:12Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, and then this, now we have the mainland.

• 1:47:15Speaker 00

  Mainland, Edredour, 10 year old Scotch.

• 1:47:18Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:47:21Tim Ferriss?

  Now, while I taste, I'll let you answer this. I think that a lot of people, myself included, tend to assume or have a bias towards older age. Like, oh, it must be better if it's older.

• 1:47:32Speaker 00

  It's the same.

• 1:47:33Tim Ferriss?

  What's the?

• 1:47:33Speaker 00

  It's the same rule with wine. More expensive isn't better. Older isn't better. And in some cases, you can actually go really too far. I mean, I feel like for you, that the rye, which is 10 years old, is probably beyond the pleasure principle for Tim. And things age at different rates depending on where they are. So it's cold and wet in Scotland. Proof can actually tend to come down in the aging. You can lose some alcohol through evaporation. And whereas you lose less water because it's so humid. But it takes, because it's cooler and wetter, it takes more time to develop the patina that happens with age. Whereas if you're in a rick house, which is just an aging warehouse in Kentucky,

• 1:48:17Speaker 00

  like even today, the end of summer, it's hot. It's really hot. So that whole thing proceeds at a much greater pace.

• 1:48:25Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:48:25Speaker 00

  Much faster. And you can, you can blow right by the sweet spot and get to something that just becomes a varnishy, turpentine-y extract of oak, and you've lost all the other character and nuance.

• 1:48:37Tim Ferriss?

  So, which makes perfect sense, right? I mean, because if you have that added heat, all the metabolic processes are accelerated.

• 1:48:44Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:48:44Tim Ferriss?

  Now, what was the name of this again? I'm so bad at spelling anything from Scotland because there are lots of O U G Hs and so on that I can't make sense of. But what was the name of that?

• 1:48:54Speaker 00

  This is Edra Dour. So E D R A D O U R. 10 year. I think it's actually Scotland's smallest distillery.

• 1:49:03Tim Ferriss?

  I like this a lot.

• 1:49:04Speaker 00

  It's my favorite in Scotland.

• 1:49:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no kidding?

• 1:49:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:49:07Tim Ferriss?

  This is delicious.

• 1:49:08Speaker 00

  On the mainland, yeah.

• 1:49:08Tim Ferriss?

  Really, really nice. And I don't...

• 1:49:12Tim Ferriss?

  Words are failing me, uh, which I suppose happens a fair amount, but particularly in this case. How would you describe this?

• 1:49:19Speaker 00

  To me, it's, it's pretty and rich, which is kind of a, it's a, again, back to balance. It's a hard balancing point. It's easy to get rich. Well, I feel like, how do you stay pretty?

• 1:49:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, I also feel like it's strong, like it has, uh, and look, guys, for those people listening, like, I get really irritated by sort of the snobbery that can come with a lot of this, but I'm lacking better words to use. But if so, yeah, there's, there's a lot of ridiculous stuff out there when it comes to beverages at the high end and so on. However, with this, like, the way I would describe this is it's a lot stronger, not necessarily in alcohol content, but the, the characteristics and the flavors are a lot stronger than Japanese.

• 1:50:06Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:50:06Tim Ferriss?

  But just short of, like, really headbutting me in the face, like the,

• 1:50:12Speaker 00

  The rye.

• 1:50:12Tim Ferriss?

  The rye.

• 1:50:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:50:13Tim Ferriss?

  And so this I could do for a longer period of time.

• 1:50:16Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:50:17Tim Ferriss?

  You know, it's kind of like 75 is perfect. 85, if you're in the sun, can be too much. And this is like hanging out right below that threshold.

• 1:50:26Speaker 00

  Yep, I totally agree. It feels like more, I mean, when I taste this, I actually taste raisinettes.

• 1:50:30Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:50:31Speaker 00

  It's such a trip. I mean, I get the malted milkshake thing, but also like the, the chocolate over the raisin. And it's rich and it's yummy and it wears the alcohol well.

• 1:50:40Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. Yeah, I do get it. I mean, power of suggestion being what it is. Who knows?

• 1:50:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:50:49Tim Ferriss?

  What about, uh, let's, so this is the, the Islander.

• 1:50:52Speaker 00

  Exactly. This is full gas on a lot of fronts. Big, it's rich. It's, uh, the most alcoholic on the table, has 54.2% alcohol, so that's 108.4 proof.

• 1:51:09Speaker 00

  Not for the meek. From Ardbeg, Oogedal.

• 1:51:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that'll put hair in your chest.

• 1:51:20Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:51:22Tim Ferriss?

  I had trouble with that. I was trying to do the, the, what is it? The aeration and swishing and whatnot. I was like, oh my God, I could barely get the first part down.

• 1:51:30Speaker 00

  If I could just put a little bit in your mouth and it just like fills your whole cranium with this crazy perfume.

• 1:51:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's very perfumed, very smoky, just like before.

• 1:51:43Speaker 00

  I love sipping on these, but just in small amounts.

• 1:51:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:46Speaker 00

  It's not a drink, it's like, it's a sip.

• 1:51:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that would have to be like sitting, reading a book at your own speed. Someplace cold.

• 1:51:54Speaker 00

  Cold, snowing outside.

• 1:51:55Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds, yeah, like an island in Ireland, maybe.

• 1:51:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or Scotland.

• 1:52:00Tim Ferriss?

  Or Scotland, I'm so sorry, Jesus.

• 1:52:02Speaker 00

  I did it earlier, right? And I'm supposed to know.

• 1:52:04Tim Ferriss?

  Punching them, the earphones as we speak.

• 1:52:09Tim Ferriss?

  So the, now let's, let's talk about one other thing and we can introduce it maybe as, as a story. So tell me this, the story you told me about the convoy. And let's use that as a segue into mezcal.

• 1:52:22Speaker 00

  Yes, let's do. So I was telling a story about, I have a mezcal brand, it's called Sombra. I started 10 years ago, actually, when everybody thought I was selling mescaline.

• 1:52:36Speaker 00

  Like, Richard, you're gonna go to jail. I was like, what do you mean I'm gonna go to jail? And they go, well, mescaline's illegal, it's a drug. I was like, no, no, no, no, it's not mescaline, it's mezcal. You know, without going through the long strokes, 10 years has taken us a long ways. And we've gone from a time when everybody thought that to it's actually on everybody's lips. So mezcal is really the authentic agave spirit of Mexico. Everyone talks about tequila. Tequila's really changed and in a lot of ways has been bastardized over, over the last, you know, well, since 1860, when it became tequila. Before that, it too was mezcal. So for me, the idea is.

• 1:53:10Tim Ferriss?

  In what ways, I'm sorry to interrupt, in what ways does it become bastardized?

• 1:53:13Speaker 00

  So at a certain point, you could have used dozens of different types of agave to make, and you can still mezcal, and tequila was one of those things. And when it went from being vino de mezcal. To being tequila, they legislated for industry and not for artistry. So no longer could you use these, you know, twenty some flavors of agave. Just blue agave? Just blue. And they'd say, because it's the best. Well, it's not necessarily the best. It's the best if you want something to grow big, fast, soft, so it's easy to cut. And now they create this monoculture of, I mean, it's like the cheetahs. There's no DNA variability. And so the first. You said like cheetahs? Yeah, you know how they're about to be extinct because there's, there's like. Oh, no.

• 1:53:55Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Their, their gene pool is so tiny that if like they, everyone's afraid if one of them catches the flu, they're all gonna die. Oh, there's no variability. None whatsoever. Huh. So the same thing's happened in tequila with blue agave. And that's, that's why they have these blights that take out all these plants. Tons of production. Yeah, it's huge. Yeah. And so in addition to the plant, it was the, the processing methods have changed. And you, you are so far from what was originally produced in tequila. To get to what they're making today that, hey, I still drink the stuff, but, um, but it's not. If you drink tequila, what do you drink? It's kind of like the Dos Equis guy. I don't drink tequila often, but when I do. I drink, I drink a lot of Siete Leguas. I think. What was it called? Siete Leguas. Okay. They do a great job. I think. Siete, seven? Uh huh.

• 1:54:40Speaker 00

  Lenguas? Leguas. Leguas. Yep. L E G U A S.

• 1:54:45Speaker 00

  I like the guys at Tequila Ocho. Actually, I don't know the guys at Tequila Ocho. I like their tequila a lot. Yeah. Um, and then we make one called Astral, like astral. Yeah. Which is really a deliberate throwback to what was it like before 1860 when they legislated for kind of basically vodka production. So for me, mezcal is, it's the, it's the real thing, you know? It embodies that intellectual value we've been talking about and it embodies process and place and people and geology and a geography and a history and cuisine. It's all in there. So that's, that's interesting to me. And so we've been down there doing this stuff, but it's definitely. What is mezcal for, so for people who haven't had it? So think of it as tequila from the rest of Mexico. But for sure, it's going to be more full flavored.

• 1:55:30Speaker 00

  So much like this last Scotch you had that, um, where they used peat in the process that gives it that smoky quality. Yeah, it has a very smoky characteristic. So if we just take a step back and you think, okay, well. What is, if mezcal is made from agave, what's agave? Agave is starch. And you need yeast to eat sugar to make alcohol. Yeast don't eat starch. So the way you turn a starch into a sugar is with heat. And today, it's done with steam or even with enzymes in some strange cases. Cases I try to avoid personally, but traditionally it's done with fire. And so in mezcal production, you actually dig a hole in the ground. You build a fire.

• 1:56:14Speaker 00

  You put rocks over that fire and then you put the agave hearts in there and you roast them for two days, buried in the ground. And that, that heat converts the starch to a sugar. It also, much like this last scotch, it imbues it with a smoky flavor. And so that's why mezcal has that smoky quality. And so think of it like, you know, the original tequila, plus smoke.

• 1:56:33Tim Ferriss?

  And that's based in Mexico?

• 1:56:36Speaker 00

  That's based in Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico. So almost the very bottom.

• 1:56:39Tim Ferriss?

  Also famous for mole.

• 1:56:40Speaker 00

  Also famous for mole. Great food, amazing people, amazing traditions.

• 1:56:44Tim Ferriss?

  A little unpredictable.

• 1:56:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's definitely unpredictable. You can, you know, there's so much beauty and so many wonderful things and you definitely have to watch your step.

• 1:56:55Tim Ferriss?

  So what happened with the convoy?

• 1:56:56Speaker 00

  So what happened with the convoy? We were there with some, some friends and business associates and after being out at our palenque, our two cars pulled back on, you know, so it's 17, palenque is where you distill. And after driving from the distillery in the mountains, 17 kilometers down a dirt road back to the main highway, which is the Pan American, we turned onto the Pan American highway and two trucks of state police soldiers pulled in front of our two cars and started slowing down. And the guy who was driving the car in front of us didn't understand the clues, which is we were also supposed to slow down and stop with them.

• 1:57:31Tim Ferriss?

  Was he Mexican?

• 1:57:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was. Yeah, Oaxacan. Yeah, he's the son of the guy that was driving our car.

• 1:57:37Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:57:38Speaker 00

  And just didn't know the clues.

• 1:57:40Tim Ferriss?

  Didn't pick up on the hint.

• 1:57:41Speaker 00

  Which was a little scary because, you know, in, you know, in half a breath, you had two trucks of soldiers with their rifles pointed at the car and my, my, the guy that works for us down there, he's an amazing guy, he's been there forever, he knows the clues and he's like grabbing the kid, stop the car, stop the car.

• 1:57:57Tim Ferriss?

  And I would imagine.

• 1:57:58Speaker 00

  Merely averting disaster.

• 1:58:00Tim Ferriss?

  And they're stopping the car, I would imagine, I mean, I've had this experience in Panama, I've had it many other places to extract, potentially extract like a mordida, like a little. Have a nice day.

• 1:58:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, have a nice day. Exactly. Yeah, you know, I don't think I've actually been on that road without having been stopped and had the car emptied at one point or another.

• 1:58:22Speaker 00

  You know, I'm told from our, our local friends that it's always better when we're in the car. You know, I wouldn't obviously know the Converse situation.

• 1:58:31Speaker 00

  But, you know, all in all, everybody's okay. And that's all that matters.

• 1:58:33Tim Ferriss?

  I had a scary experience in, uh, well, scary because I'm not accustomed to this happening elsewhere. And say the United States been Panama where I was driving out from Panama City to, I want to say Boquete, where I was actually driving to an, to the coast to go to the Coiba Marine Reserve, which is amazing. And I got stopped a million times because it's just like obvious white dude in a pickup truck, driving. And the tip I got before arriving in Panama was get an international driver's license. Okay. Because when they pull you over, they're going to ask you for your passport. And if you hand it over.

• 1:59:13Speaker 00

  You don't get it back.

• 1:59:13Tim Ferriss?

  Now you won't get it back until you do everything that they ask you to do.

• 1:59:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:59:17Tim Ferriss?

  But if you have an international driver's license and you say you don't have a passport, and then they say, well, we're supposed to find you, but then you have to go to, to trial and this place and the other. And then the protocol, the dance is, is there any way I could pay my fine now? But the price is going to be 10, 20, 100 acts if they have your passport as opposed to the international driver's license.

• 1:59:36Speaker 00

  Yep. Same thing happens in France all the time.

• 1:59:39Tim Ferriss?

  In France?

• 1:59:40Speaker 00

  Ah, the joke used to be with myself and my friends when we were doing a lot of wine work there is that, you know, don't let Richard drive right off the plane. So at some point, first day, getting pulled over, same story, give me your passport. Of course, I'm never giving them my passport. You can have my driver's license. Plenty of those. But same, same story. Oh yeah. Pay the fine right on the side of the road.

• 1:59:59Tim Ferriss?

  That's so wild. Yeah, it happens more places than not, I would say.

• 2:00:04Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 2:00:05Tim Ferriss?

  Brazil's the scariest, but that's another podcast. Uh, you can see, what is it? Trupa de Leech, the Elite Squad or Elite Team. There's a movie. You can watch that and then you'll know what I'm talking about. Uh, the second one's pretty good as well. Uh, so the, uh, let me, let me ask you a couple of rapid fire questions as I nurse this Taketsu.

• 2:00:28Speaker 00

  When you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind and why? My folks, both of them equally, my parents. Why? They were able to come from a place that's, I mean, I consider myself successful, but when I look at what they did, I think of their road as having been so much harder, so much harder. I'm super impressed. So is, is success then in the overcoming of obstacles? It's finding your way to happiness. That's what it is. And, and that doesn't have to be associated with anything material or not. And for them, it was just changing the surroundings and finding a way out when, you know, there was no helping hand. You gotta, you gotta do it yourself. When do you, so if you had to pick someone besides your parents?

• 2:01:10Speaker 00

  Pick someone beside my parents. Well, I, you and I share lots of friends, many of whom are successful. And it's really anyone that makes their own way.

• 2:01:19Speaker 00

  So our buddy, I mean, Sacca, who's been on the podcast. Extremely successful. Say he's cut his own way. He's cut his own way. Um, I mean, Obama's cut his own way, you know, so many. Just to be clear, folks, that is not a mutual friend, or at least I don't know him on a first name basis. Yeah, but you know, I mean, it's someone that, that's, you know, maybe against odds has, has figured out how to do what they love to do. And that's pretty cool. When do you lose track of time?

• 2:01:45Speaker 00

  I lose track of time on airplanes where I spend a lot of time. And I actually, Tim, I really try to take that time for myself. I, I like getting on the airplane and there are times like this morning when I, when I flew here, it was like, you know what? I'm going to fly back this afternoon. I have to work, but 99% of the time when I get on the plane, it's Richard time. And I shut it off and I get in a book and what used to be long flights are over in a minute and, or even just think or anything. But that's, that's where I actually lose track of time. How many days a year do you fly? I am, I sleep in a hotel more than 300 nights a year. Wow. Yeah. I'll, I'll do 170, 180,000 miles this year. What book are you currently reading?

• 2:02:26Speaker 00

  Um, what, it's the, I'm, L, please don't be mad when I slightly get the title wrong. Shouldn't muss, the intersection of should and must. I have it right over there in the corner. Exactly. Yeah. L. Luna. Check it out, guys. I actually, I actually bought.

• 2:02:39Tim Ferriss?

  Two thousand plus copies of that to mail out with this quarterly mailing that I sent out to people.

• 2:02:44Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 2:02:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a really, really excellent book. What book, so speaking of gifting, what book do you gift? Have you gifted most often to other people?

• 2:02:53Speaker 00

  For sure, it's my favorite book ever. It's called A Fan's Notes.

• 2:02:56Tim Ferriss?

  A Fan's Notes?

• 2:02:57Speaker 00

  A Fan's Notes by Fred Exley.

• 2:02:59Tim Ferriss?

  What is that?

• 2:03:00Speaker 00

  I was probably fifty years on since it was written and Fred's amazing, super smart. For me, this is like first, second, and third place in terms of best book.

• 2:03:13Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow. Okay, this is a strong endorsement.

• 2:03:14Speaker 00

  And he's a brilliant guy who keeps messing up his life over and over again.

• 2:03:20Tim Ferriss?

  Is this autobiographical?

• 2:03:21Speaker 00

  He says that certain events may resemble his own life.

• 2:03:25Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, but it's considered a novel?

• 2:03:27Speaker 00

  Yes, it is.

• 2:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 2:03:28Speaker 00

  Yes, it is. Yeah, and it's painful and I'm not, I don't see sad movies. I don't read overtly sad things, but this is, it's neither of those things, but man, it's such a lesson. It's really, really special.

• 2:03:43Tim Ferriss?

  What are?

• 2:03:44Speaker 00

  And it's funny and it's literary and it's nuts.

• 2:03:47Tim Ferriss?

  What is one of the, what do you get from it when you, when you read it? So I take it you've read it more than once?

• 2:03:53Speaker 00

  I'm probably on, it's actually, I'm about a third through. Again, it's next to, next to my bed and I'm probably on my twelfth or thirteenth reading.

• 2:04:01Tim Ferriss?

  What do you get from it?

• 2:04:03Speaker 00

  Resolve.

• 2:04:04Tim Ferriss?

  Resolve?

• 2:04:05Speaker 00

  Resolve.

• 2:04:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's good.

• 2:04:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's huge.

• 2:04:07Tim Ferriss?

  That's everything.

• 2:04:08Speaker 00

  I mean, I'd be a liar if I didn't say I'm not totally motivated by many factors, including fear of failure. It's, I would like to say that that's not true, but I'm supremely motivated by it.

• 2:04:22Tim Ferriss?

  What is failure in your mind? And it could be something very specific. I mean, like whether it's related to business or whatever, but like in your mind right now, what is the fear, what is the failure that you're afraid of?

• 2:04:32Speaker 00

  Not achieving the things I want to achieve.

• 2:04:34Tim Ferriss?

  Like what?

• 2:04:34Speaker 00

  Not, well, continuing to work for myself, which is great. That's huge. I mean, time is everything. I mean, there's, there's nothing in my mind besides time and having your opportunity to decide how to spend it. That's because it's gonna be over. I don't believe what you want to believe. I believe that we get one swing and that's it. I want to make it great and not having the occasion to decide what I do, not having the occasion to express myself in whatever way I feel like.

• 2:05:01Speaker 00

  That's failure.

• 2:05:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a horrifying thought, like I'd be physically ill thinking about it.

• 2:05:06Tim Ferriss?

  If you, I think you're a spectacularly good teacher. If you were teaching a ninth grade class.

• 2:05:14Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 2:05:14Tim Ferriss?

  You could teach anything you wanted.

• 2:05:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:05:17Tim Ferriss?

  What would the class be?

• 2:05:18Speaker 00

  Love yourself.

• 2:05:19Tim Ferriss?

  Love yourself.

• 2:05:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, you gotta love yourself before you love others and without it, you, nothing productive is gonna happen. And we can all bang our heads on the wall, but unless you like really come from places like this is who I am. This is what I, I have, which is like a mind trapped in a physical being.

• 2:05:35Tim Ferriss?

  Trapped in a, in a meat cube.

• 2:05:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, trapped in a meat cube. Like you have to like acknowledge that and then make the most of it. I mean, really appreciate yourself and especially ninth grade, that like, I mean, my daughter actually just entered 10th grade, but that's like such a tough time on kids. I remember I, how, what a tough time I had and you, it's very easy to lose your bearings, like are they doing it right? Are they doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? Like all that's just like, you know, be, love yourself.

• 2:06:00Tim Ferriss?

  I always thought I was gonna be a night, like a teacher and specifically want to teach ninth grade because that's, that's the, uh, so the fork in so many paths.

• 2:06:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:10Tim Ferriss?

  You know what I mean?

• 2:06:10Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 2:06:10Tim Ferriss?

  But what, so how would you help someone cultivate loving themselves? So I'll be honest, I have trouble with that. I beat the shit out of myself all the time.

• 2:06:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:21Speaker 00

  I think, um, helping someone cultivate that, I think,

• 2:06:26Speaker 00

  well, it's probably.

• 2:06:27Tim Ferriss?

  I'm starting to feel this tucketsu.

• 2:06:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's good. I would say it probably comes with context again, you know? I mean, we're always like, grass is always greener. Well, why don't you taste that grass, right? And see what it is and see what it actually feels like. Try it on, taste it, roll, put your toes in it. And if you, if there's a way to, again, give people context of other things, we've done it with our daughter by, with travel. You know, we just got back from the Galapagos Islands two weeks ago. By far the best place I've ever been and the Galapagos themselves are really amazing. And then you spend some time in Waikiki. And that's a real story of have and have nots and it's an amazing thing. But you know, this is one example of, you know, what is it like to, to live these other lives?

• 2:07:08Speaker 00

  And everybody struggles, but the happiest people are, you know, that's the real wealth is, is being happy. And if you can show. People, you know, give examples of people that are happy, you know, regardless of their material circumstances. I think that's, that's a way to share with kids that it's worth loving yourself and making the most of it.

• 2:07:29Tim Ferriss?

  Now, when you look at your financially successful friends, both of us know a lot of people who have achieved extraordinary levels of financial success.

• 2:07:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:07:39Tim Ferriss?

  And we'll exclude Chris from this conversation because I don't want anyone to think that we're referring to him. I think Chris is a case study. I'm very fascinated by him because he's, he's crafted an incredible life for himself.

• 2:07:50Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 2:07:50Tim Ferriss?

  But for of those financially successful people who are unhappy.

• 2:07:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:07:57Tim Ferriss?

  Generally unhappy.

• 2:07:58Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:07:59Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think they have in common? What do they, what do they, why are they unhappy?

• 2:08:03Speaker 00

  Misplaced goals.

• 2:08:05Tim Ferriss?

  Misplaced goals.

• 2:08:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, you know, chasing, chasing the financial award purely for the financial award is not the right way to do it in my esteem. You know, that first chef that gave me that first wine job, he was great. We were overlooked for a couple of things in the press and I'm, you know, I'm new in this, this food and wine world. And he's like, look, Richard, if you work for the awards, you know, you don't, you don't do good work. But if you do good work, the awards will come. And they might not even be the specific press things. But I think that, that people that do have that fantastic wealth and are unhappy, you know, they, maybe they worked for the wrong thing. Maybe, you know, barring things like

• 2:08:47Speaker 00

  traumatic loss of a loved one or something like that, you know, all that aside, maybe they don't love themselves. Maybe they don't know how to share. Sharing is a big deal. Like, you know, or maybe, maybe you just believe in the wrong thing, you know?

• 2:09:00Tim Ferriss?

  Asking for help is a big deal, too.

• 2:09:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is a big deal. It's a huge deal.

• 2:09:03Tim Ferriss?

  There's a, there's a book by Amanda Palmer, who's also been on the podcast, partially because I read her book, The Art of Asking. Incredible musician, but just fucking ask for help already, you know?

• 2:09:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, ask for what you want.

• 2:09:16Tim Ferriss?

  I, because I grew up as such a bookworm, I constantly try to revert to like pro and con lists and writing and research to solve problems. And like nine times out of 10, especially after I read that book, I was like, Jesus Christ, Ferris, like, you could have just called this friend for that.

• 2:09:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:09:32Tim Ferriss?

  This friend for that. And they would have been happy to help you.

• 2:09:34Speaker 00

  Totally. Another thing, I think, this is a little bit out of left field, but I think that some of those people, people forget. That meat box you said were contained and you gotta take care of that thing.

• 2:09:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:45Speaker 00

  You see so many people that are unhappy because they don't.

• 2:09:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:48Speaker 00

  You know, and I live in this weird place, like I make people happy by sharing booze, knowledge and accessibility with them. Too much, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing and that, you know, and so you see a lot of that, too.

• 2:09:59Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you, I mean, you are, you know, a trafficker of goodness, but also vices for a lot of people.

• 2:10:06Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. I struggle with that, actually.

• 2:10:08Tim Ferriss?

  Well, no, no, no, and I'm not saying that in an accusatory fashion because I've got a, I mean, I have an entire closet full of booze behind us.

• 2:10:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:10:14Tim Ferriss?

  But the, uh, my question for you, I mean, you're in very good shape. You travel 300 days of the year or more.

• 2:10:23Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:10:24Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the keys? Like, what do you?

• 2:10:26Speaker 00

  Choose your hotels wisely, as in make sure that the gym is real. In fact, the best hotels don't have a gym at all, but they have a relationship with a real gym, you know, across the street or down the block or something. That, that actually probably guides my hotel choice. Ten to one to any other factor.

• 2:10:42Tim Ferriss?

  How do you determine that?

• 2:10:44Speaker 00

  Well, you know, that's a big thing, part of it's experience, right? So like, I love to stay at the Standard East Village in Manhattan, not the High Line, but the East Village, because they don't have a gym, but they have a relationship with the New York Health Club right across the street.

• 2:10:56Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:10:57Speaker 00

  So you just kind of like, you dig around, you can find that stuff. But, um, I mean, physical fitness is, it's paramount to me. I know that I think better when I'm healthy.

• 2:11:07Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11:08Speaker 00

  I'm a nicer guy when I've exercised, you know? And, and actually, I actually, I really try to peak. So if I'm at home, I have the most amazing trainer, Erin Carson in Boulder. She's awesome. And we've figured out the schedule, so let's do a real, um, you know, build over seven or if I'm at home for even 10 days, which is rare, even four days, like, let's make it hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, and then I need a rest day when I have to get on the plane.

• 2:11:30Tim Ferriss?

  When you have to travel, that's smart.

• 2:11:31Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 2:11:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:32Speaker 00

  Yes, you really try to fit him in there.

• 2:11:34Tim Ferriss?

  What, uh, what is your week? Let's just say you're traveling for a month at a time.

• 2:11:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:11:39Tim Ferriss?

  What does your week of exercise look like?

• 2:11:42Speaker 00

  Minimum seven, or pardon me, five out of seven days. Minimum five. And you know, sometimes that might be-

• 2:11:47Tim Ferriss?

  When do you work out?

• 2:11:48Speaker 00

  Try to do mornings.

• 2:11:49Tim Ferriss?

  Mornings. What time?

• 2:11:50Speaker 00

  You know what? I have to caffeinate. I would be a liar if I didn't say I'm, uh, I'm fully addicted to caffeine. Prefer it from tea to coffee, but I'll take it however I can get it.

• 2:12:00Tim Ferriss?

  What type of tea?

• 2:12:01Speaker 00

  Uh, we drink a lot of Oolong, a lot of Pu'er. Um, those are the two that matter a lot. I have a friend, I would, I would have considered myself like a coffee geek extraordinaire. Um, everything dialed in, the scales and the, you know, the temperature, everything just like perfect. Um, and then I met this guy Sebastian who taught me all about tea and I had tried so hard, like, you know, I read, read something like, oh man, I should really know about tea. Like it appeals to my wine minder.

• 2:12:27Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 2:12:28Speaker 00

  And I could never do it. And then I met Sebastian and he just ruined me and it's, uh-

• 2:12:31Tim Ferriss?

  Ruined you in a good way.

• 2:12:32Speaker 00

  Oh, in a good way. So it's all about in pursuit of tea now.

• 2:12:35Tim Ferriss?

  It's cool.

• 2:12:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the best. Yep. So caffeine and then try to exercise right away. And certainly before you get into the email or your phone or any of that stuff.

• 2:12:44Tim Ferriss?

  What time do you wake up when you're on the road or do you try to wake up?

• 2:12:47Speaker 00

  I try to get a minimum of eight hours. So the time is a moving target, especially when, you know, I've been in five time zones in the last seven days.

• 2:12:54Tim Ferriss?

  And when you have to socialize at night with-

• 2:12:56Speaker 00

  It's huge.

• 2:12:57Tim Ferriss?

  Now, when you, is the travel to talk to retailers and distributors, is that primarily like, what accounts for the bulk of the travel?

• 2:13:06Speaker 00

  Um, you know, it's, I can't, it, it's a lot of two things, making and selling, right? So the making part, um, is easy. It's easy to, I mean, for me, you dream something up and you go and you create it, you know? And it's a physical thing and you have something, it's done. Um, but that takes work. I mean, I make things, um, on three continents today.

• 2:13:29Tim Ferriss?

  Which continent?

• 2:13:30Speaker 00

  Uh, Australia. Um-

• 2:13:32Tim Ferriss?

  Wine?

• 2:13:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. We, so we make wine in Australia.

• 2:13:35Tim Ferriss?

  What's it called?

• 2:13:35Speaker 00

  It's, uh, called sousette. Which is S U C E T T E. First wine comes out next month, actually.

• 2:13:42Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's exciting. So let's put a date on that, because people will listen to this for months.

• 2:13:45Speaker 00

  Okay, so that's going to be October of 2015.

• 2:13:49Tim Ferriss?

  Cool.

• 2:13:50Speaker 00

  And Sucec means to suckle in old French.

• 2:13:53Tim Ferriss?

  So it's a... That's a cool one.

• 2:13:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. You let your mind run wild with that.

• 2:13:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was gonna say it.

• 2:14:00Speaker 00

  So the white wine will be called Nicheon, and I'll let you look that up.

• 2:14:05Tim Ferriss?

  Have you smell it? I'll let everybody look it up.

• 2:14:06Speaker 00

  N I C H O N. You guys can put that together.

• 2:14:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:11Speaker 00

  We make some rosé under my essential brand in the south of France. And of course, we make somber mezcal in Oaxaca.

• 2:14:19Tim Ferriss?

  Sombra meaning shadow.

• 2:14:21Speaker 00

  Sombra meaning shadow.

• 2:14:21Tim Ferriss?

  How did you choose that name?

• 2:14:23Speaker 00

  Two ways. First of all, I mean, I think mezcal is a little, even still, a little forbidden, a little dangerous. And I believe everybody has a dark side.

• 2:14:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:31Speaker 00

  Certain of it. I know I do.

• 2:14:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:34Speaker 00

  And the second is maybe a little bit more historically referential of mezcal, very much in the shadow of tequila.

• 2:14:40Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I like that.

• 2:14:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:14:42Tim Ferriss?

  I have a friend who's done a lot of work with, shall we say, plant medicine psychedelics.

• 2:14:49Speaker 00

  Awesome.

• 2:14:49Tim Ferriss?

  And oddly enough, he...

• 2:14:53Tim Ferriss?

  That's true, right? The little people. And mushrooms, sacred mushrooms have been used for millennia in Mexico, of course. And he did not spend time in Mexico. But for whatever reason, he drank all sorts of different alcoholic beverages before this work. And now, for whatever reason, he can only drink mezcal.

• 2:15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I believe that.

• 2:15:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:15:16Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know why, but that's, it's the only beverage that he can consume. And he does it very irregularly, but when it comes to alcohol, mezcal is all he can consume.

• 2:15:25Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 2:15:25Tim Ferriss?

  Out of nowhere.

• 2:15:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, wow, crazy.

• 2:15:27Tim Ferriss?

  Really weird, right?

• 2:15:28Speaker 00

  It's good for you.

• 2:15:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, apparently so. And...

• 2:15:32Speaker 00

  Well, the other half of that travel question, why so much, is the selling piece.

• 2:15:36Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, right.

• 2:15:37Speaker 00

  So if you, the listener, want to buy a bottle of sombra, the first thing I had to do was import it to America. Then you have to sell it, thanks to, you know, the repeal of prohibition and all the laws that follow that. I have to sell it to a distributor. So then we have to sell it to a retailer and then the retailer has to sell it to you. So there are all these things. So I can't just assume that you'd make the first sale and then it ends up on your shelf.

• 2:15:59Tim Ferriss?

  So where can people find Sombra? Like for those people listening?

• 2:16:02Speaker 00

  Thankfully, everywhere. 10 years later, all across America.

• 2:16:05Tim Ferriss?

  Everywhere.

• 2:16:05Speaker 00

  Everywhere.

• 2:16:06Tim Ferriss?

  So like if I went to, I'm just making one up here. What is it? KNL here? Am I making that?

• 2:16:11Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 2:16:12Tim Ferriss?

  KNL Wine? It's not wine, but KNL.

• 2:16:15Speaker 00

  I don't know if KNL has it, but we're certainly all over San Francisco.

• 2:16:18Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, cool. Well, you guys can search for it. Sombra. What is the $100 or less purchase that comes to mind that has had the biggest impact on your life?

• 2:16:29Speaker 00

  That's interesting.

• 2:16:34Speaker 00

  I'm not a material guy and having that said, I like nice stuff.

• 2:16:37Tim Ferriss?

  It could be something free.

• 2:16:38Speaker 00

  Something like?

• 2:16:39Tim Ferriss?

  It could be something free.

• 2:16:40Speaker 00

  Could be something free.

• 2:16:45Speaker 00

  Can it be a donation?

• 2:16:46Tim Ferriss?

  Can it be a donation? Sure.

• 2:16:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we try to support small things in many ways all the time. So my daughter and I just

• 2:16:56Speaker 00

  gave to Donors Choose.

• 2:16:59Speaker 00

  Which is amazing.

• 2:16:59Tim Ferriss?

  Donors Choose is amazing. I'm on their advisory board.

• 2:17:02Speaker 00

  Oh, that's so cool.

• 2:17:02Tim Ferriss?

  I've been doing stuff with Donors Choose for like seven years.

• 2:17:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so to have the occasion to like, sit with her and figure out like, we want to give it to this class near our community. Here's why. I mean, it's enriching because you get to enrich that experience in Donors Choose, but it's enriching for my daughter and I to have that discussion and it facilitates so much more. You know, and father-daughter time and like her education and that's, that's meaningful.

• 2:17:27Tim Ferriss?

  Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I, my parents used to help me. I want to say it was UNICEF, but I could be getting that completely wrong. I think I am. But determining what to donate to someone in a third world country, whether it be like a number of chickens or a goat or a this or a that. And the, the, the conversation and walking your kid through, helping them walk themselves through the decision is fascinating. It's very valuable.

• 2:18:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:18:04Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have a favorite movie or documentary?

• 2:18:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, several.

• 2:18:13Speaker 00

  It's funny, also on the topic of the kid, we watched The Breakfast Club last night.

• 2:18:20Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 2:18:20Speaker 00

  First time.

• 2:18:20Tim Ferriss?

  Blast from the past.

• 2:18:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so she's just started sophomore year in high school, new school. And I was like, I remember this being so formative 30 years ago for me. And we watched it and just, you know, shooting tears and laughter and a whole thing. But there are so many great movies like that. I wouldn't say that's my favorite, but for sure that's the most recent on my mind. I love the movie Baraka.

• 2:18:43Tim Ferriss?

  Which is actually a good one.

• 2:18:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, very visual. Yep, and it really reminds me of a lot of things. I mean, one.

• 2:18:49Tim Ferriss?

  B A R A K A.

• 2:18:50Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah. And Baraka for me is meaningful because it talks about how amazing our planet is, how fragile our planet is. It reminds me of the geologic time scale. This is like a profoundly important thing to me at the geologic time scale. When you look at how long it's taken everything and how, I mean, what's San Francisco going to look like in several hundred years? Well, we're all going to be long gone. In fact, humanity might be gone. Who knows? Who knows what will happen? But that we're just this tiny little blip in in time, like we matter not at all.

• 2:19:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:25Speaker 00

  And so it just reminds me to party. Have a great time. You're barely here. Get after it and crush your life. It's awesome.

• 2:19:32Tim Ferriss?

  Don't take everything so seriously.

• 2:19:33Speaker 00

  Totally, totally. That's it.

• 2:19:39Tim Ferriss?

  With your workouts, if you could only choose three exercises or types of exercise for your workouts, what would you choose?

• 2:19:46Speaker 00

  Burpees.

• 2:19:47Tim Ferriss?

  Burpees?

• 2:19:48Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:19:50Speaker 00

  Squats.

• 2:19:53Speaker 00

  And intervals.

• 2:19:54Tim Ferriss?

  What type?

• 2:19:54Speaker 00

  Short intervals, 40 seconds on, 20 seconds off, 40 seconds on.

• 2:19:58Tim Ferriss?

  Running?

• 2:19:59Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 2:20:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's a good combo. You're ready for the military.

• 2:20:02Speaker 00

  You know, I used to run a lot.

• 2:20:06Speaker 00

  The longest I ever ran it once was 82 and a half miles.

• 2:20:09Tim Ferriss?

  That's fucking long.

• 2:20:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, the race was 100, so that was a problem.

• 2:20:15Speaker 00

  Eighty-two and a half miles is no joke. Yeah. And so can you just like fuck off at any given moment and just like run 20 miles? Um, I think I could probably get 20 miles done. I don't know if I could run them and that and I quit. So after that summer. After the eighty-two and a half? Yeah, I, you know, I started running in the year 2000 when I moved to Colorado and it was great. I loved it. And then I started competing and then, you know, as a citizen did pretty well. By no means professional, but I really liked it and it was a way to clear my head. Um, and they say about runners, you're either running from something or to something. And there was for sure an element of that to my running also. Which one is, which one was it for you?

• 2:20:55Speaker 00

  Uh, for both. I can name both pieces. Um, so, but I found, okay, let's go farther. Let's go farther. And then it was, um, you know, all trail marathons and then, you know, 50 mile races. And that was great. And then you cross that threshold and, and it becomes really catabolic. Yeah. And I was almost 30 pounds lighter than I am now. And you're not a huge guy. I mean, you're not thin, but you're not like a huge. Totally. You don't have 30 pounds to spare. No. And then, but you know, it's about, you know, strength to weight ratio and how quickly you're going to get over that mountain. And then over the next mountain, then over the next mountain. And I wanted to get stronger and as things start to break, but as you, you would like get strong in the gym. And then you go start running again and your body just eats itself.

• 2:21:39Speaker 00

  And then it all goes away and you're like, ah, wow. And then with that comes so much inflammation and I'm a big believer, at least for me, it's just not, you know, I actually believe for people, it's not good to run that long a distance. Yeah. So feel free not to answer, but what were you running from and running to? Oh, you know what? I am, um, I think probably not that dissimilar to you. I'm also very hard on myself and, you know, when I do something, I want to do it very, very well. And I think everything was really working very, very well for me, except for my marriage. And that wasn't working well at all. In fact, that was, it was brutal.

• 2:22:19Speaker 00

  And I was running to a place of candor where, again, part of being hard on yourself is being honest with yourself. And I, I treasure candor and the occasion to, to, to just live in it, right? So, um,

• 2:22:37Speaker 00

  Running to that place where I was honest about all of it and you know where I was wasn't that place but.

• 2:22:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not particularly good at intimate relationships.

• 2:22:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:22:50Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think I'm the worst, not abusive, I'm not, you know, a total bastard, but I uh, I shut off a lot in intimate relationships.

• 2:23:01Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:23:02Tim Ferriss?

  It's like, I don't like the uncontrollable, unpredictable nature of a lot of it.

• 2:23:06Speaker 00

  I feel you completely.

• 2:23:07Tim Ferriss?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 2:23:08Speaker 00

  A hundred percent.

• 2:23:09Tim Ferriss?

  Because you're the guy who has, you're the guy who has like the seven foot stack of notes on wine.

• 2:23:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:23:13Tim Ferriss?

  And then you win the game, right? I mean, so to speak.

• 2:23:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're used to making things better.

• 2:23:16Tim Ferriss?

  And it's like, we're, we're sitting for the, those people who aren't here, which is everyone, uh, we're right next to a bookshelf and I have an entire shelf of notebooks.

• 2:23:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:23:24Tim Ferriss?

  Right, and it's like, that's how I can predict the trajectory of.

• 2:23:29Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 2:23:30Tim Ferriss?

  Fill in the blank.

• 2:23:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:23:32Tim Ferriss?

  But with a relationship, oh wait, there's another person with their own ideas and feelings and concepts and preconceptions, just like me.

• 2:23:37Speaker 00

  Yep, free radical.

• 2:23:40Tim Ferriss?

  My dog just stretched and kicked the great door open.

• 2:23:44Speaker 00

  It's amazing.

• 2:23:45Tim Ferriss?

  But it's not moving, that's hilarious.

• 2:23:46Speaker 00

  She's still beautifully asleep.

• 2:23:48Tim Ferriss?

  Still completely asleep.

• 2:23:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:23:51Tim Ferriss?

  Um, if you could give your, let's see. When you were 25, where were you?

• 2:23:57Speaker 00

  Uh, when I was 25, I had just finished my graduate thesis and was about to take that first cooking job in Montana.

• 2:24:07Tim Ferriss?

  What advice would you have given yourself at 25?

• 2:24:10Speaker 00

  Don't be so fucking shy.

• 2:24:12Tim Ferriss?

  Don't be so fucking shy.

• 2:24:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's why.

• 2:24:14Tim Ferriss?

  You were shy?

• 2:24:15Speaker 00

  Oh dude, I, I, even really until recently, I can still think of instances, like within the last 24 months, where like, man, Richard, I wish you had been more forward. I wish you'd, you know, talked about, I wish you'd asked for X, instead of being so subtle and implying it, and I try to go for that subtle elegant thing, which sounds really nice, I think part of that's actually being shy.

• 2:24:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:35Speaker 00

  And I am. You know, ferociously competitive with myself, but sometimes the clues that you put outwardly are too subtle to be heard, or someone's just talking louder than you.

• 2:24:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:24:49Speaker 00

  And, and that's, that's actually more and more the case, I think. So I would have told myself to have been much more forward.

• 2:24:57Tim Ferriss?

  And what about at thirty? So let's, let's put a time arc on that. Where were you at thirty?

• 2:25:02Speaker 00

  So at thirty, my daughter had been born four months prior. I had the best wine job in the world. I was getting fit, living in Aspen, learning a ton, very, very focused on this master sommelier exam. And that, what would I do there? I would probably party a little less, which I, you know, I keep coming back to this thing of balance. And so, you know, you're in Aspen and you party like a rock star.

• 2:25:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Aspen's party town.

• 2:25:35Speaker 00

  Wow. What that means for me is I also want to be competitive on all these other levels. So you have to balance it with exercising like an Olympian. And I did that. And so everything was very, very full. It was great. You know, the exercise was crazy. The party was crazy. The sleep wasn't much. Family time was interesting and wonderful on so many levels and not on others. And then you're working and you're studying for this exam, right? And so if I don't believe in regret, I do not believe in regret. And so I don't want this to come across as that. But if I had that piece to redo, I would dial back some of the party, not all of it.

• 2:26:15Speaker 00

  I still loved, I still party. I love it. But, but I would take some of that back and then reallocate that time elsewhere.

• 2:26:24Tim Ferriss?

  Where would you allocate it?

• 2:26:26Speaker 00

  I probably would have started my first business sooner than later. It wasn't that far afterwards. Yeah, I passed the master sommelier exam and started my first wine company, the next day.

• 2:26:36Tim Ferriss?

  What did your first company do?

• 2:26:37Speaker 00

  So it was called Betson Scholl. I founded it with an amazing guy, Dennis Scholl. He's really, really special.

• 2:26:43Tim Ferriss?

  S C H O L L?

• 2:26:44Speaker 00

  S C H O L L. And Dennis.

• 2:26:49Speaker 00

  I mean, Dennis is amazing for a lot of reasons that you guys can look up and you should. He's really, he's really very, very, very driven also. We started making wine in Australia, then we added France, then we added Napa Valley. Then we co-founded another company called Scarpetta, making wine in Italy. And in 2009, we sold all of it, Scarpetta to an investor group and Betson Scholes to a small public company. That was a great day. But yeah, you know, it comes back to that time function. I'm always thinking about, you know, I don't want to beat myself up over something where I see an inefficiency in my past, but I, you know, if you have it to do over, I would try to get rid of those inefficiencies.

• 2:27:30Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. What do you think are things that many people do automatically? Or, well, I'll leave it at that. What are things that a lot of people do automatically or assume they have to do that they should question?

• 2:27:47Speaker 00

  Go to college. Holy shit. Like, I went to, to college and I learned, I mean, I went to Occidental, I made the dean's list and not the good dean's list. I made Dean Knower's blacklist.

• 2:28:01Tim Ferriss?

  What did you do to earn a place on the blacklist?

• 2:28:07Speaker 00

  Oh, a bunch of D's and F's and I partied. I was just, I mean, I was in LA, I was a long ways from the beach, but you know, like take a kid from the desert and stick him in the city and he loves the ocean. I grew up on, you know, also in the ocean almost every weekend in Mexico with my family. So I spent, you know, five days a week riding waves and not in class. So that was, that was fantastic. I wouldn't take that back. I learned a ton and I learned it about myself. It wasn't so much like, you know, I don't know a whole lot about Macbeth and I don't care and I don't feel bad about it, but I learned a lot about Richard Betts and that was really, really meaningful. I don't think I need to go to, you know, a liberal arts school and spend as much money as I did, which was all loan, you know, so on and so forth, you pay it back and deal

• 2:28:52Speaker 00

  with it. But I don't think that that was necessarily the only path to achieve that, whatever level of self-awareness was achieved by spending that time there.

• 2:29:01Tim Ferriss?

  If you hadn't gone to college, how do you think your trajectory would have been different?

• 2:29:06Speaker 00

  I think, you know, I, I look on the bright side. I'm hopeful that it would.

• 2:29:14Speaker 00

  Be those, be more abbreviated. So those inefficiencies in time, I think that some of those would have gone away. You know, probably would have been useful to go volunteer somewhere and just work, you know, for, for good cause.

• 2:29:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:30Speaker 00

  And come back and you develop that self-awareness. You'd be thankful for so much. And you would have avoided some of those distractions. Although, I don't know, Tim, like, I don't know if, if the need to like hit the wall is genetic or not. Like, I definitely had a need to hit the wall.

• 2:29:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:48Speaker 00

  Hit it hard.

• 2:29:49Tim Ferriss?

  Hit the wall in what sense?

• 2:29:52Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, just find, find the guardrails, be it with substances, with grades, with

• 2:29:58Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:29:59Speaker 00

  significant others, with

• 2:30:00Tim Ferriss?

  Just to push it until it breaks.

• 2:30:02Speaker 00

  With physical things or you could have died, you know, like, yeah. So

• 2:30:08Speaker 00

  those, finding, finding those guardrails is important, however you find them.

• 2:30:13Tim Ferriss?

  What, uh,

• 2:30:16Speaker 00

  Being at a fancy school facilitated a whole lot more fucking off.

• 2:30:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:22Speaker 00

  It was, which sounds sort of counterintuitive and strange, but you're in this isolated bubble.

• 2:30:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:26Speaker 00

  You're not facing the real world.

• 2:30:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, until you get out and you face your loans, but you're really not facing the real world. So I don't think that was super productive.

• 2:30:34Tim Ferriss?

  What would you put on a billboard if you could have a billboard anywhere?

• 2:30:40Speaker 00

  Oh, it'd advertise my ninth grade class. Love yourself.

• 2:30:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. There's a book that helped me quite a bit with that, uh, called Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It. It's got a very scary cover.

• 2:30:51Speaker 00

  And he does.

• 2:30:51Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, yeah, this guy with a gunning at his head with like a heart. Uh, it's, uh, by Kamal Ravikant, who is the brother, he has the best hair in the world also. You should look up Google Images. Kamal Ravikant, I wish I had his hair. Uh, but his brother was also interviewed on this podcast, Naval.

• 2:31:10Tim Ferriss?

  Any other, well, first of all, I want to segue to, obviously, the book that is right here in front of me, The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All. Whiskey with an E. W-H-I-S-K-E-Y.

• 2:31:24Speaker 00

  Given its country of publishing, in this case.

• 2:31:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. And the, what are people gonna find in this book?

• 2:31:31Tim Ferriss?

  Know your booze before you choose.

• 2:31:32Speaker 00

  Exactly. You're gonna find democracy is essentially it. I think, I think the role of the critic has never been less important. I really believe that. You know, it's one thing to curate something, but it's another thing to prescribe something. And I'm really interested in helping people enjoy their lives. We don't do it with stuffed shirts, no ascots, no talking down to people, no fancy language, none of that, none of that matters. I mean, it's certainly not inclusive. All those things do serve to intimidate and make it exclusive. So, much like the wine book, my co-creators, Crystal English

• 2:32:13Speaker 00

  Sacca and Wendy McNaughton, and I have tried to apply a methodology to knock whiskey off the pedestal and say, "Look, this is it. It's not that hard. This is what goes in it. This is what makes it taste the way it does. And then decide which pieces you like and put those back together to find the drink that's gonna make you smile." And that's, that's the key.

• 2:32:34Tim Ferriss?

  You have some beauty, I mean, the format is beautiful. I mean, the layout, you guys are a hell of a team. I mean, Crystal, obviously, is amazing. Wendy, just incredible artist. And for instance, there's, there's a two-page spread here. It's, it's Richard naked laid out on a bear rug. No, I'm kidding. It's the language of the label in the United States and everywhere else. And it's this bottle split in half and it allows you, it helps, it shows you in a very graphic way, or a very visual way, how to make sense of labels. And then you have, I haven't explored this yet, but I'm excited to, the map to your whiskey desires.

• 2:33:12Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 2:33:12Tim Ferriss?

  So, can you explain this?

• 2:33:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, so once you've worked-

• 2:33:15Tim Ferriss?

  This looks like an astrological chart, but it's not.

• 2:33:17Speaker 00

  Exactly. Essentially, the book is, it's 20 pages, 10 spreads, hard cardboard, hard cardboard pages. So, it's laying it that kid's book feel, except for adults, obviously. And when you scratch and sniff your way through it, you understand, okay, this is what the different grains smell like. Next, this is what the different wood components smell like. Finally, this is what place smells like. This is what the place where the whiskey is made and how it's aged imparts to the different whiskeys. So you've scratched and sniffed your way through this thing, and now you put them back together. So you start in the middle, and the first question is, you know, what do you, do you want it spicy? Okay, well, I'm guessing you probably don't because you didn't go for this rye.

• 2:33:56Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:33:57Speaker 00

  Yep, but you do like the malty thing, right? So, so you would-

• 2:34:01Tim Ferriss?

  Milkshake size. So then I end up heading outward. This looks like a, um, a series of concentric circles, kind of like a choose your own adventure map to finding your ideal group-

• 2:34:12Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 2:34:13Tim Ferriss?

  -of whiskey.

• 2:34:14Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 2:34:15Tim Ferriss?

  And as you travel from question to question, from inside to outside, then you end up with your, your selection of whiskey to start with. And what's really cool, I didn't notice until right now is, and they, they traverse a spectrum from mix slash rocks to sip to sip slow. So like this last guy that we had would be in the sip slow category.

• 2:34:37Speaker 00

  Sip slow, exactly.

• 2:34:38Tim Ferriss?

  So cool.

• 2:34:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:34:40Tim Ferriss?

  So, so cool. Well, dude, this is, this is fantastic.

• 2:34:43Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:34:44Tim Ferriss?

  I, um, everybody should check this out. I, I have given away the Scratch and Sniff guide that Richard and his, uh, his co-creators put together for wine many, many times. And, uh, I'm very excited about this because as insecure as I was around wine, I could bullshit my way through it, but I could never bullshit my way through whiskey. And this actually gives you more than bullshit. It gives you a very solid fundamental understanding, not only for yourself, but that you can explain to other people. So you should definitely check that out. Richard Betts, B-E-T-T-S. Where can people find you on the interwebs and so on?

• 2:35:22Speaker 00

  At Yo Betts.

• 2:35:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yo Betts.

• 2:35:24Speaker 00

  Everywhere. Yeah, Yo Betts, Y-O-B-E-T-T-S. And that's true for everything, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, so on and so forth, Gmail.

• 2:35:30Tim Ferriss?

  So people can, people can holler at you and say hello on Twitter.

• 2:35:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:35:34Tim Ferriss?

  At Yo Betts, Y-O-B-E-T-T-S. If there's any, is there any ask, recommendation, suggestion that you have for the people listening that is not related to the book?

• 2:35:45Speaker 00

  I love that. Um, well, first of all, I'm psyched you're listening. That's, that's a really big deal.

• 2:35:52Speaker 00

  You know, I mean, I can only speak from personal experience and that's to be candid. That's been the biggest touch point. Is that, see, I'm still struggling with it. It's the biggest thing that I've, I've really worked on over the last decade. I mean, my whole life.

• 2:36:11Tim Ferriss?

  Being candid, meaning being direct.

• 2:36:12Speaker 00

  And with, you know, with each other, with yourself, that's really where it starts. You know, love yourself to love others, but be candid with yourself, then you can be candid with others. But like, you know, I don't want, obviously, we're all getting older. I live in a, in a business of excess and I want to get old gracefully. So I can't lie to myself and say, oh, you're in good shape or, oh, you did the pushups yesterday. You know, like be honest with yourself. Like, look dude, get up and do them, you know? Or it matters. You have to. Or hey, look, you know, maybe you're not being as good a partner as you can be to your partners. Like, you know, wake up and think about how to be a great partner. Which generally means, you know, what's the mission of the partnership? And do that. Or I need, you know, there are a million examples in all of our lives if we look around.

• 2:36:55Speaker 00

  Like, and it's a matter of like, what can we do better? That's it. What can you do better?

• 2:36:59Tim Ferriss?

  Be candid.

• 2:37:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:37:00Tim Ferriss?

  With yourself and others.

• 2:37:01Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:37:01Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. Richard, this is fantastic.

• 2:37:05Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:37:05Tim Ferriss?

  I am feeling this delicious set of adult beverages that you have laid before me.

• 2:37:10Speaker 00

  Right on.

• 2:37:11Tim Ferriss?

  I've been, I've been sipping two of them and then we had the Take Tsuru. And then this was the

• 2:37:17Speaker 00

  The Edredour.

• 2:37:18Tim Ferriss?

  Edredour 10 year. Delicious. So everybody, check it out. Also, visit Yobets everywhere on the interwebs and you can find the show notes, as always, links to everything that we talked about at fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out. Click on podcast or just fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. You can also find every other episode and all the show links and show notes associated with those. And as always, thank you so much for listening. Until next time. Bye.

• 2:37:51Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? And my answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body, did not get paid for that. And I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases. If I can't get what I need through whole-food meals throughout the rest of the day. And you can get 50, oh my gosh, 50% off, yes. 50% off if you go to athleticgreens.com/tim. That's athleticgreens.com/tim. Check it out. It's tasty, but more important, it will help you not screw up when you're doing your nutritional planning.

• 2:38:36Tim Ferriss?

  So for me, it just covers the bases, takes a load off my mind, puts a lot in my body. And check it out, athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 2:38:47Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by MeUndies. If I'm not going commando, I'm in MeUndies. I have been testing these underwear for three to four months now, pretty much every day. And in fact, threw out a bunch of my other underwear this morning. And on the road, in the house, they are extremely comfortable. They look good, feel good. They are made of micro modal, two times softer than cotton, as scientifically tested using the Kawabata method. Sounds very fancy, of course. And I get a lot of compliments from ladies for these. You don't get diaper butt, you don't get the tired elastic band. They look great and they have underwear for both men and women. Check out meundies.com/tim and you can see everything I've been wearing.

• 2:39:29Tim Ferriss?

  They're ridiculous, the sublime, everything in between, including my favorite, which is called out. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention their lounge pants. This is a new thing. And I've been wearing their lounge pants when I record podcasts. I've been wearing them out and about when I'm walking the dog, meeting people for coffee. And they are extremely comfortable, though they're made from the same material as the underwear. But some of them, like the blue ones I have, have pockets, so you can walk about without seeming like you're... Off of your meds and completely crazy. So that is awesome. And if you're not happy with the first pair you try on, I assume that refers to the underwear, they'll refund you completely and you can keep the pair you tried on for free. But if you're that kind of person, you should be ashamed because that's disgusting.

• 2:40:13Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, meundies.com/tim, check it out. And until next time, thank you for listening.