Ep 40: Andrew Zimmern on Simple Cooking Tricks, Developing TV, and Addiction

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

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

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Well, it would seem inappropriate to me.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  you have tons of designers around the world who compete for your business and submit different ideas and designs and drafts. You have an original design that you love, or you pay nothing. It is fantastic. I have used it, I have mentioned it before, including in The 4-Hour Workweek as a resource. Check it out, 99designs.com/tim. And if you use that link, you'll be able to see what I've done on the platform. You will also get $99 as an upgrade for free, which will get you more designs, more submissions. So check it out. Exoficio... boy, where do I begin? I have a long history with Exoficio. Exoficio makes clothing. And as far back as 2007, 2008, I had a hit video that went viral called "How to Travel

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:35Tim Ferriss?

  this video, which has a bunch of other packing tips. But this underwear, this clothing, is not just for the gents. Ladies, you have choices too. And they really have an incredible collection of high-quality products that I've used for almost 10 years now. So check them out, exofficio.com/tim.

• 2:57Tim Ferriss?

  Malakilikimaka is the thing to say on a bright Hawaiian Christmas day. Oh, Jesus, I didn't see you there. Hi, everybody. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I have the holiday spirit in me, and it's not even anywhere close. But you know what? It's never too early for Christmas music. And for all those people out there who disagree, jolly up. Really, get along with it. In any case, I have a really fun episode for you guys, or at least I had a blast doing it, and I hope you do as well. But first, I do get asked about tea. And I said "asked," as if it's

• 3:38Tim Ferriss?

  A-S-S-E-D, which I haven't really said before. Might be getting late. Maybe I need some more caffeine. But yes, I was asked about my tea preferences. And one of my favorites, which is a little tougher to get, but it's fun to look for, is from Taiwan, or at least it's mailed from Taiwan. And that is from Living Tea, which is a really interesting organization. You can check them out at livingtea.net. And it is a 1960s Hui An Sheng Pu Er. And that is spelled H-U-I, space, A-N, space, S-H-E-N-G, space, Pu Er, P-U-E-R-H. Sheng, sheng, by the way.

• 4:20Tim Ferriss?

  Means uncooked, or raw, or fresh. It is the same character that is the nama of nama biru in Japanese. And it is also the se of sensei. So if you have sensei, like teacher, in Japanese, it literally means born before. So before born is the se of shang, okay? And coincidentally, there are words in Japanese that use the same characters that you find in Chinese, but they mean very different things. So sensei is shen shang, or mister, like Mr. Chang in Chinese. Pretty funny stuff. The perhaps most amusing example is tegami.

• 5:04Tim Ferriss?

  Tegami in Japanese is letter. You write someone a letter, a love letter. That is tegami. But that is shouji in Mandarin Chinese, and that is toilet paper. Too bad. Lost in translation, what are you gonna do? When you don't have a writing system and you need to borrow slash steal someone else's, well, sometimes those things happen. Anyway, I digress. The guest for this episode is none other than, you guessed it, Andrew Zimmern. Andrew Zimmern is a fantastic fellow. He's also a world-class chef, television host and producer, food writer, and, at the end of the day, incredible teacher. You've probably seen his show Bizarre Foods or Dining with Death.

• 5:49Tim Ferriss?

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

• 6:33Tim Ferriss?

  This was a very fun interview to do. Andrew is a pro. He's really good at this type of interview or conversation. He's an enthusiastic guy, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. So without further ado, please meet Andrew Zimmern.

• 6:51Tim Ferriss?

  Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm very excited to have Andrew Zimmern with us. Andrew, it's so nice to have you on the phone.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Thank you very much, Tim. Good to talk to you.

• 7:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's been, I think, a long time coming for me. I remember being interviewed on your podcast what seems like ages ago, and maybe that's because you sort of acted as my ad hoc therapist while I was experimenting in television.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  I don't think with you, anyone acts as your ad hoc anything. I mean, there's a beautiful, unintentional, intentional rhythm to the things that you do. And I just, you know, I mean, over the last couple of years, we've become friends, and it's what people do for each other. I like to think I always remain teachable, and at the core of your stuff, that's sort of what I take from it in its broadest possible sense. And so, I think it's doubly charming that you actually practice what you preach.

• 7:58Tim Ferriss?

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

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Sure. And let's not assume that the way I'm doing it is actually successful. I mean, you know, the therapy session can work both ways. I mean, you know, it's a...I oftentimes wake up in the middle of the night and wondering, you know, wonder to myself if the number of balls that I'm juggling is actually in inverse proportion to my ability to make some of those balls bigger.

• 9:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I know.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Visualize that.

• 9:09Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, I was thinking of that and then the plate spinning and I think,

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 9:13Tim Ferriss?

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

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, no, I definitely did. You know, I grew up watching Great Chefs of Europe on PBS, the first Great Chef series. And I loved the, the intensity of that, the attention to detail and the focus on the food. I morphed a little bit into, at one point in my TV watching, as I was sort of looking at things that I wanted to, to pay attention to, to the, sort of the, the smartness of what Michael Palin was doing. You know, I, I saw, you know, I'm, I'm from New York, so I, when someone says, what do

• 10:25Speaker 03

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

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Was within my unique ability to deliver. Um, I always thought that, you know, I mean, obviously Rick Steves is an expert on travel and has been everywhere and a legend in the business and pioneered and without folks like him, folks like me don't have a job, uh, there's probably not even a travel channel actually. But at the end of the day, I, I thought that anybody could have stood there and said what he said, you know, you could have paid an actor to deliver those lines and nobody would have been the wiser. I wanted to do things that were more docu, what we now call docu-follow. And I put all those sort of things together. Um, I also had, you know, there was a bit of a Trojan horse, uh, involved in, in, in my show pitching.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  Um, I wanted to make a show that, that, uh, allowed me a platform to talk about patience, tolerance and understanding in the world. I wanted to change the, the tone of our national conversation away from the things that we don't have in common towards the things that we do have in common. Um, I wanted to make a show that, uh, railed against the, you know, the vile human frailty of contempt prior to investigation. And so if you go and you pitched that and, and then sort of launch into this sort of travel food idea, everyone shows you the door. Um, so I basically tried to sell an, a, a food culture show with a hook, Stories From The Fringe, that ended up being called Bizarre.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  Original title for it was called Chew On This, uh, but Eric Schlosser, one of his books, that one of the children's versions of one of his books was called that. Um, and I, I, I very much, you know, snuck a show in the door, knowing that if it was successful, I'd get leverage, I'd be able to sort of morph the show into the, into what it sort of is today. It's taken me, you know, 200 shows and eight seasons, nine seasons, but I'm, I, I think the last couple of years, we really have done a fantastic job of representing, uh, cultural storytelling through food in the right way.

• 13:18Tim Ferriss?

  And I I'm looking at some notes that I took down after one of our our first therapy sessions in my direction and I found a lot of it so helpful and one of one of the recommendations was and I'm paraphrasing of course but it's the most important thing is to be you not your interactor and being yourself and keeping it within your area of expertise and that the line that really stuck with me was you know how episode one is is how you're going to have to be so

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Episode one moment one.

• 13:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so you really have to

• 13:52Speaker 03

  I mean you can never you can never take that back. I mean the I think the the there were a whole bunch of things involved in there and to tell people sort of the the the larger part of the story and have it make sense to them was that after a gazillion successes in many different areas, you know, you had the opportunity to expand your brand in major cable and it's a whole different skill set, it's a whole different set of muscles, you know, and you and I talked many times, you know, sometimes late at night and from continents, you know, far, far away about, you know, how to approach this kind of work and how to make it successful. And I think I told you the story of the first

• 14:32Speaker 03

  episode one show, it actually was the pilot. I went to the Asadachi, which is a restaurant that in Tokyo, the translation for the restaurant name means morning erection and it's true. And it's a get a mono bar, the kind of place where businessmen close deals and drink a lot. It's they're tiny little izakayas where the food is very, very strange and it's meant to, you know, if you eat snake bile, I'll eat snake bile and then the deal will be, you know, done sort of thing. And it's a place where guys get drunk and eat crazy food and then, you know, go off whoring for the rest of the day and sign, you know,

• 15:14Speaker 03

  have their number twos sign the contract. So we go to this place and the very first thing that they had me do was do a stand up outside the the building and and then walk in the door. And I there was a part of me that had all the funniest lines about making fun of their name. And

• 15:33Tim Ferriss?

  And what is a stand up just for people who might be not, what do you mean by stand up?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Well, you know, the little walk and talk. Right, right. I'm outside, the camera catches me walking down the street. This is very nineteen ninety-nine TV. Your camera's walking down the street, the talent stops, looks towards the camera, delivers a couple of lines to set up what the audience is gonna see, and then walks in the door and the camera stays on the door, the door swings shut behind them and the camera tilts up and catches the name of the establishment. Got it. Right? Yep. Uh, we no longer make our show that way, uh, but that's the way everyone did it, uh, you know, nineteen ninety-one, two thousand, nineteen ninety-nine, two thousand, when we were contemplating the pilot and then ended up shooting it, uh, right before, I guess, September eleventh was the first pilot.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  Sorry to interrupt. So you're thinking of all these lines to deliver related to the name of the place? Yeah, you know, you can make fun of these people and it's such an easy, it's the easy go-to. I mean, you see people do it all the time on TV and a little voice inside my head said, "Don't do it." Because if you do that, you're gonna have to come up with those lines all the time. You're gonna be someone that you're not. All you wanted to do your whole life was to, and quite frankly, the person that I am is very respectful of other cultures. "Don't do it. Don't give into the fast, easy, cheap temptation," which we always do. I mean, it's the easiest way. The cheap applause. Yeah, and, you know, I went, uh, all I did was I sort of walked up and turned and said, you know, the, you know, some benign line and walked in the door.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  The moral of the story being, I didn't have to make fun of the people, make fun of their food, make fun of the name, and it's turned out to be the best decision I ever made because not only does the show stand, and my brand sort of stand for, you know, people always talk about the respect that I pay to other people within the show, which pleases me and I think it's an important, uh, thing for all of us when we're travelers, um, but it's so much less work just to be yourself. You don't have to change that. There's lots of people who have hosted shows on Travel Channel, Food Network, et cetera, who are not experts in their field. They do a soul food cooking show, but if you ask them, you know, you know, what Johnny cakes are, they couldn't tell you. Because, you know, unless they did a script and the researchers, you know, had filled them in the day before.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  It's a very, very strange world on television. Some people are just presenters. You, on the other hand, myself, Tony, there's a handful of people out there, Alton Brown, are folks who have been doing their content for years before the TV camera came on and we just get to be ourselves.

• 18:13Tim Ferriss?

  No, it's, it's, uh, it's one of the aspects of your work that I've always appreciated is how genuinely interested you seem because you are genuinely interested.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's me.

• 18:26Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, the, uh, just as a side note, I have a buddy who's runs a bunch of restaurants and does a lot of, uh, his, a few of his companies do a lot of catering. And at one point, they had one of the most famous Italian chef personalities on TV hosting an event and they called, uh, this chef's assistant and asked for, uh, her meatball recipe and they said, "What meatball recipe?"

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:51Tim Ferriss?

  And it just was such an eye-opening sort of jaw-dropping experience with this guy. So, yeah, certainly what you see is not always what you get. Um, on the, on the cooking side of things, I'm, uh, just to, just to throw in, uh, some, some randomness to this. The, if, if you had to choose this, and I was gonna say for the rest of your life, but for the next, say, year, three herbs or spices to cook with, to experiment with, um, and you can modify the question, what would they, what would you choose?

• 19:21Speaker 03

  I can't exist without hot chilies, uh, shallots and, um, hot chilies, shallots and citrus lemon. I'll pick lemon.

• 19:33Tim Ferriss?

  Citrus lemon, hmm.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  It's, it's, you know, before I get to, it, you know, the, the world of herbs and spices is great, but before that, there's some other building blocks that I would prefer to have in my kitchen or my desert island, you know? Um, I'm gonna assume on my, on my island that you've, you know, stranded me on, I have access to, you know, I can walk out into the ocean and grab seaweed or fish or, you know, throw rocks at birds and, you know, get something over a fire.

• 20:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Um, and, you know, so if I had to have, the first three things that I would wanna have with me are hot chilies, uh, shallots or some kind of onion. I happen to prefer shallots of all the alliums and citrus and I, I generically choose lemon, uh, above the others. With those things, I can do everything. You know, if I, you know, sure, I could, you know, pick, you know, cumin or cilantro or basil or, you know, things like that, but it's a fairly limited use.

• 20:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  With, with the lemon chilies and, and an allium or shallot, I could, I, I can do anything and I can do, you know, ceaseless variations on them and I can cure and the variety of flavor combinations and techniques that I can use with those give me the most variety so I wouldn't be so bored. Maybe I'm overthinking the question, but that's my, that's my gut instinct is to go with those.

• 20:53Tim Ferriss?

  No, you're not overthinking it at all. And I love asking this question because, uh, you know, if, I'm still considering myself a novice cook certainly, but in doing research for the Four Hour Chef, uh, that the citrus really blew my mind when I think I either read or had someone say to me, uh, you know, I use citrus the way a lot of people use salt. And I was like, huh, that's a really interesting way to think about it.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Well, salt's an acid, you know, and citrus is an acid and there's an incredible amount of acid in all the alliums. There's an incredible amount of acid in all of the chilies and, and that's no, it's no secret as to why those things are food changing, food altering, technique, uh, based, uh, or technique inspiring ingredients to use. Um, they're much more versatile in a kitchen than, you know, basil or thyme or something like that. Um, when, when I talk to young cooks about balancing, uh, when I talk to young cooks about balancing a dish, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's texture, it's temperature contrast, texture, you know, contrast, temperature contrast. Um, and the way you build flavor contrast

• 22:04Speaker 03

  and, and create a more symphonic taste experience is by experimenting with acids and fats and, you know, so by its very nature, chili, shallots and, you know, lemon, salt, those are the things, sugar. Um, we use them in different forms, but they're very acidic and they provide much more flavor when we're cooking than most people give them credit for.

• 22:28Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, definitely. I, uh, I just, I, these are such simple things, but game changers for me as someone who sort of viewed cooking through the lens of a microwave and that was about it, uh, for, for many, many years, the, just the, the ability to take, say, chilies, a friend of mine gave me some Thai chilies that she was growing in her garden and just sort of sauteing them in cooking oil for a few minutes before using that oil for something else. It totally changes the dish. It's really so much fun to.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  It's so funny you use that example. There's, you know, I was about to talk about lemon juice the same way. Sometimes with, you know, I mean, my wife's roast chicken, she, she stuffs her cavity with lemon and herbs and garlic. And, um, that lemon roasts and it starts to break down and it boils and it perfumes the inside of that dish. Some of that lemon juice goes down onto the bottom of the pan and caramelizes and gives a tartness and a wonderful bitterness uh, to the, the olive oil based pan sauce that she makes for that dish. And it seasons the roast vegetables that she puts in them. But then when it comes to the table, that lemon flavor, because heat's been applied to it and heat sort of kicks down

• 23:41Speaker 03

  the, the impact of the citrus, she then will finish the dish, you know, with, you know, we just do it a lot in our family, a little bit of fresh citrus and olive oil. And you then have two or three or four, depending on what bite you take, different variations on that same ingredient lemon, uh, in that dish. And it creates a layered experience, which is much more, it's more sensual, it's a deeper flavor, it's more fully realized. Um, and that's the difference between the kind of, uh, you know, the roast chicken that everyone says, why is Jonathan Waxman's chicken at Barbudo so, you know, fricking awesome? And it's because even though it, it, it just looks like roast chicken with a little bit of sea salt and a salsa verde,

• 24:24Speaker 03

  uh, you know, drizzled over some of the pieces. There's so much different seasoning at different times in that dish that you are taking in a much broader symphonic taste experience than the looks of the dish would tell you exists. It's profound. I think that's the beauty of food. It's like art. I mean, I remember sitting in Madame Koretsky's Northern European painting class as a freshman at Vassar College, you know, trying to focus on, you know, the first day at school and instead of it, you know, Anne Weiss's backside, sitting in the desk in front of me. And, you know, she, she put a picture up on the wall and the picture was, you know, it's some, you know, 16th century Northern European portrait painter.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Uh, and, and it was a woman standing at a window. There was a table in front of her with a bowl of fruit and it was a sunny day outside through the window. And she said, "Everyone write down what you see and know about, uh, this painting." And everyone wrote down the same 10 things that were in there. There's a dog, she's wearing a blue dress, there's a bowl of fruit on the table. And Madame Koretsky then spent the next 45 minutes detailing what Flemish life was like in the late 16th century, based only on what she saw in the painting because, you know, there was a banana in the bowl of fruit and a pineapple, but those don't grow in Holland. So she, you know, th- these people were wealthy, they were traders, there was symbolism, but there were also, you know, she, she approached it like Sherlock Holmes.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  And, you know, I learned that day that, you know, because I was also cooking a lot at the time, you know, it reminded me of what a lot of chefs were saying and what my dad would tell me when we were sitting, when I was eight years old in a little sleepy, you know, brosserie in Laal in Paris, picking Bigornio with a big, you know, silver metal toothpick, you know? And I began to realize that I, I, I could tell stories about life through food and I, I now describe it as being able to talk and tell about the history of a people and a culture by staring into a bowl of soup. But it really is the same thing. You can deduce so much about food and in its preparation and in talking it through with people about where concerns are, just the way we're sort of geekishly talking about

• 26:30Speaker 03

  lemon, I think, you know, underlines and underscores the fact that, you know, today in America, we fetish fu- we, we fetishize food in, in a way that is greater and deeper and probably, you know, has a lot of negative impact as well as positive, but we fetishize it in a way that has never been done before in the history of the world about any sort of cultural meme. I can't think of a one.

• 26:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. No, I agree. And, uh... I want to explore that a bit, but before we do shallots, alright, so shallots, I am a I'm a big fan of shallots. I've met quite a few chefs who are also big fans of shallots. Is it possible for a novice chef to use shallots well without having very good knife skills?

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:17Tim Ferriss?

  I think that it is. Okay, I want, I would love for you to elaborate because that's always been for me and I consider my knife skills pretty decent, but it's still been challenging for me.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  How so?

• 27:27Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, well, I

• 27:29Speaker 03

  In a recipe that requires them to be minced or sliced thin?

• 27:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly, which most of the recipes that I've come across seem to require that. So I'd love for you to, and I can, I can do it, but it's not my favorite, it's not my favorite work, it's not my favorite prep work to do.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Well, there's two, there's two issues at hand. Uh, one is how to use a shallot and what's required of it, despite what a certain recipe will tell you. And the other one is your knife skills in particular.

• 27:57Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  And you're no different than any other person who loves to cook and wants to get better. And if you loved golf and you were playing golf all the time and you told your friends, God, you know, my, my putting just isn't great. They'd look at you and say, how do you do on the putting green? And you'd say, I don't go to the putting green. And they'd laugh at you.

• 28:15Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 28:16Speaker 03

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

• 28:43Tim Ferriss?

  I do.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  That investment in yourself, uh, front side investment in time, lifetime of time saving. My wife always marvels, you know, she says, it takes you half the time to make a recipe. And, you know, I've been cooking for a lot longer than she has, but I'm, the more she practices knife skills, the faster it becomes for her because that's the sort of mundane stuff simmering in a pot, watching it, you can do other things, you can multitask. I think at the end of the day, it's assembling your ingredients and your mise en place. So some of that is knife skills, some of that is how you organize your kitchen. Um, there's a lot of things that you can do to, you know, speed things up, but practice is, is something that helps. The second thing is, you know, might be equipment. I'm just going to assume with as many,

• 29:28Speaker 03

  you know, food geek friends as you have, that you have the right knife for yourself. Um, but I use a, I use a short chef's knife, usually about eight inches, uh, as my handy sort of go-to knife, and I use a thin-bladed one so that I can use the front of it choking up to cut small things, and I can rock it and chop it using the back three-quarters of it if need be, and I can even choke up and tornay a mushroom if I need to. Um, but I can do almost everything with that one knife. Then the third issue for, for this really becomes, you know, the mythology of food and why we believe certain people and they tell us we have to do a certain thing. To a large

• 30:11Speaker 03

  degree, you do a lot of myth-busting and you find out that the, the, you know, in reading all your stuff, there's always something that is perceived to be a truth that it turns out, once you investigate it and you talk about it with other experts, turns out you don't need to go from A to B to C to D to get to point E. Sometimes you do.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Oftentimes, you can just go A to B, and if you do B really well, or do B differently, you don't need C and D at all. You arrive at E. And I, I don't think there's anything wrong with people, with people using a, a Ben winner or a mandolin, some of those vegetable slicers.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Where you put the blade on a thin sle- setting and you can shave that shallot into tiny little pieces. Um, there's nothing wrong with using that. There, you know, stack up those slices and then rock your knife across it a couple of times and you'll have a, a micro dice that would rival anything that, you know, you know, Masaharu Morimoto can create. Um, I, I, I sort of, I, my wife reads recipes and I'll see her doing something. I say, "Why are you cutting the shallot that way, or why are you cutting the carrot that way?" She goes, "Oh, it says so." And I read the recipe. I'm like, "Well, there's no need. You can, you can just peel them and leave them whole in the..." In the, in the oven, you know, if you slice them into little coins, they're just gonna disappear

• 31:34Speaker 03

  in the pan. You know, a lot of times recipes, you know, except from a very small handful of culinarians, are not as exacting as they should be, and when they are exacting, they're giving you unnecessary information that I think creates a lot of unnecessary busy work.

• 31:50Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, definitely. I, um, one thing that blew me away, I, I, I really, this just blew my mind, is how poorly most recipes perform when you have a half a dozen people recipe testing them. I, I was just, I was, I, I could not believe and how poorly almost every recipe performed, uh, because I, I had for the Four Hour Chef, you know, I had people in, say, at a high altitude, low humidity in Aspen versus people in Georgia or Florida, because I wanted to see how that would affect things. And, uh, you would find out that in many cases, somebody would go to a famous restaurant, a writer, and not, not certainly faulting them for that, take a, take a recipe that is designed for, uh, 200 covers, right?

• 32:35Tim Ferriss?

  So like massive quantities of food, and then simply use division to take it down to serving for two or four people. And, uh, man, it's, a lot of it just didn't make any sense at all. Uh, and, uh, no, it's, it's nice to hear you say that. And also, as a piece of trivia, I'm not sure if the brand talks about it, but, uh, so the Benreiner, the "beni" means convenient in Japanese. That's why it's called, and, uh, it's a hell of a device, man. You gotta watch your fingers. But yeah, it's, uh...

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Well, you do, but you, you also learn to leave the tails on your shallot and hold on to that. And then at the very end, I mean, you're, you're not handling, you know, rock cocaine. I mean, you know, you're, it's, it's a shallot. I mean, that last little quarter inch, just throw it away. Um, it, it, it's amazing to me that, you know, a lot of people knock Martha Stewart, uh, they knock, um, magazine recipes, whether it's, you know, Rachel Ray's, or, you know, even Food & Wine, the magazine I write for. The biggest folks in the business usually write the most exacting recipes because their audience is very quick to turn on them if things don't work out.

• 33:46Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  I always, when I look at recipes and suggest them for my wife and she says, "Oh, it's a great recipe for pound cake," and we go on the internet and there's twenty recipes for pound cake, I go with the one that even describes to a quarter of an inch the size of the pan. Because if someone is describing that level of detail, you know that they've gone through it.

• 34:06Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  The person who writes a recipe that says, you know, "Grease a cake pan," you know, they haven't made it. It's a tip-off right away that something is wrong.

• 34:14Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. It reminds me a lot of the David Lee Roth anecdote about the, I think it was the brown M&Ms. I wanted to have all the brown M&Ms removed from the M&Ms that would be in the trailer waiting for him because he, and that was not, I mean, he's a crazy person, but aside from that, it was, at least anecdotally, to ensure that the people managing the tour would read that level of detail in the contract. And that if they didn't catch that, there would be other, more substantial things, equipment related, setup related, that they would also miss, and therefore, that was the litmus test, to see if they would catch that type of detail. And I agree with you, like, get a medium-sized saucepan. What the, what does that mean?

• 34:57Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 34:58Tim Ferriss?

  To a novice.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 35:00Tim Ferriss?

  So, the, to shift gears just a little bit, you went to a great school, Vassar, traveled, it sounds like, as a child or a young man to Paris and stuff.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, my dad was in the international advertising business, so when I was, you know, six years old, I was, I started going to Europe three or four times a year, mostly with him, sometimes just for three or four days at a time, and it was, and he, I'm a paler version of him. He loved to eat and travel and drink and, and told stories in a day where you, you needed to command a dining room table with great storytelling if you, if you were, if you were kind of that person that took up space the way my dad did. I mean, he was a great taker-upper of space wherever he was. You knew he was there.

• 35:48Tim Ferriss?

  And it's, it's, I think it paints a picture, it might paint a picture for people who aren't familiar with all of your background, that you had a hockey stick-like career, very few bumps in the road, from start to finish, just this straight ascension to the TV star that you are today. But, one thing that I, that I noticed, and I'm embarrassed, I didn't know this earlier, is it seems like you were homeless for a period of time, and I was hoping that you could comment-

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Oh, I was a fucking mess.

• 36:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  You know, I grew up in a very idyllic surround, I had every opportunity and every advantage that a kid could have. I grew up in New York in the 60s, my dad ran a big ad agency, it was a privileged lifestyle, we had more than one home, we had more than one car, I went to a hoity-toity private school, I went to two months of summer camp in Maine. But at the same time, you know, my parents divorced, you know, my dad, when, when he left, when he and my mom separated, there was a lot of curiosity as to why, because there wasn't fighting in our house, there wasn't anything unusual. My dad was coming to grips with, you know, his own, you know, sexuality and sexual preferences, and, you

• 37:02Speaker 03

  know, thank God, was true to himself, and found love with my stepfather, and they were together as partners for 46 years, and married for the last year. And, it was the state of Maine where they moved finally, passed the American Equality Act. But it was a big struggle, and it was, it was really impactful, you know, for a six-year-old in 1967, it was a different world than it was today, and so, you know, I, my mom had an operation in a hospital to get an appendix scar removed in 74, when the bikini lines went down. And, ended up being, they gave her the wrong anesthesia in surgery, she was in a coma for a year, hospitals for three or four years, she was never the same when she got out of

• 37:44Speaker 03

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

• 38:28Speaker 03

  disease called Moore. And so, you know, by the time I got to college, I was a a daily heroin addict. I was, you know, my my first week at college, I was hospitalized with alcohol poisoning and arrested for narcotics possession. The the school that I was at, uh, did an intake on me, paid for a uh, a chemical dependency evaluation, and I I registered chronic on the Jell-O mix scale. Uh, you know, and the the counselor told me the time, he said, you're gonna die, you know, addicts and alcoholics of your variety wind up in jails, institutions are dead. And you've already done jail time, which I had. He said, you've already been institutionalized, which at that point I had. And he said, so there's

• 39:12Speaker 03

  nowhere really else for you to go. And, you know, you tell that to an eighteen year old kid, they laugh at you. I laughed at him. And um, I didn't sober up till I was thirty one. And things got progressively worse. You know, alcoholism and drug addiction is a progressive illness. It got worse every single day of my life from that point forward. And I went from a place where, you know, in that meeting, I told the guy, you know, no, I don't have a problem, you know, to when I finally, uh, had my last intervention that started this sobriety almost twenty-three years ago, I just told him I didn't care. And that was a horrible spot. And those last three or four years of uh, my using, I I

• 39:52Speaker 03

  was in that I don't care spot. I wanted to die. Um, I lost my apartment, the sheriff of New York evicted me. I was sleeping in an abandoned building on a pile of old clothes that I tossed a bottle of Comet cleanser around every night before I went to bed, uh, to keep the rats and roaches off of me when I passed out. Um, I stole purses on streets. I mean, I I was, I was a, I was a mess. And, you know, it's, it's, it's really sad. Um, most people just see the face of addiction as as that person. You know, I was living in a bandit building. I didn't shower for a year. I mean, I was disgusting. I took meals in, in shelters. I got clothes at the Salvation Army. I mean, I, I was, um,

• 40:35Speaker 03

  I was a garden variety street person in New York, the type that you cross the block to avoid. You know, I wasn't pushing a, a shopping cart, but I was, I was filthy and, and stank and was, you know, wearing rags. And, um, ultimately, uh, I went into a hotel to try to drink myself to death. It didn't work. Uh, I had a, a moment of clarity for the first time in, in a fifteen year period and called a friend and asked for help. And two days later, um, I, you know, I tried to talk him out of that help, of course, once he gave it. Like any alcoholic, you know, I, I asked for someone to throw me a life preserver and then I tossed it back at him

• 41:14Speaker 03

  because I didn't like the color orange. Um, and I immediately was, you know, sent to, uh, beautiful, uh, Center City, Minnesota, to a treatment center called Hazelton. And, which is how I wound up in Minnesota. I always wondered. A born, born and bred New Yorker. And, you know, I had a couple of friends who had come through. I'm, why am I lying to you? Half of my high school went through Hazelton. Um, we all went right from, you know, Studio Fifty Four together to treatment together. And I, I was, you know, my friends told me, they said, "You have nothing to go back home for. You've never been able to make your life really work." I'd, I'd been successful in restaurant business in New York and I'd done a lot in a career because I was talented.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Um, you know, I was the guy that could put out five hundred plates of, you know, poached eggs at brunch in a busy, you know, Central Park West restaurant. I could stand there and sling it on the line in a three-star Michelin restaurant in New York. And in those days, they didn't have a Michelin guide there, but you, you get the drift. I worked in those kinds of places with those kinds of chefs. And, um, it was the, it was the, it was that skill set that kept me employed, but ultimately my alcoholism and drug addiction wound, you know, stuck me in Minnesota. So I kept thinking I'd go back. Um, I'd, you know, I'd work for a year and a half for Thomas Keller at Raquel and I'd work for Ann Rosenzweig at Arcadia. And with, you know, great chefs in New York City, uh, um, many of whom fired

• 42:42Speaker 03

  me after a day of working because they caught on to my shit. A lot of them didn't. Uh, but I wanted to come back to New York and give it another try and my friend said, "Don't do it. Stay, stay in Minnesota. Do something different." And so I started here and I ended up opening up a restaurant. It became very successful. I left that. I got into the media business because I felt there was an opportunity there that if I didn't seize it, the door would kind of shut forever on that kind of opportunity. Um, just because I saw the popularity of, of food and media in that intersection and I wanted to be a part of it early on. And

• 43:15Tim Ferriss?

  How old were you at that point?

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh. Uh, I, twenty-three years I was so, so it was fifteen, uh, fourteen years ago I stopped. I, I was, I had the rest, I was in the restaurant business here in Minneapolis the first seven years that I lived here. Um, then I spent a couple of years consulting and I was, at that time, I was working for free for a local radio station doing a food show, a local TV station where I was the, you know, morning chef on one of those wacky local morning shows.

• 43:45Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:46Speaker 03

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

• 44:26Speaker 03

  taught me how to write, uh, again. And it was, I mean, I was the luckiest guy in the whole world.

• 44:33Tim Ferriss?

  If you, I, I mean, it's an incredible story, uh, and, uh, it gives me a lot to think on. One of the questions that immediately jumped to mind for me was if, if you had the opportunity to interact with someone who was exactly where you were at age eighteen or twenty.

• 44:55Tim Ferriss?

  Is there a way to persuade that person to avoid that descent into despair and destitution? I mean, because I mean-

• 45:06Speaker 03

  You know, you know, the answer to that question is no.

• 45:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's what I'm asking, yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, no, I have that opportunity all the time. I mean, I'm very active in a, in a 12-step group and, you know, I, I believe in carrying forward the message that was carried to me, that there is another way of living, that there is a solution to the problem that, you know, alcoholics and addicts have. The, the, the bigger issue with, you know, the question that you posed is that alcoholism and drug addiction has a major component, in fact, the defining component of those diseases, and it is a disease, despite what Gene Simmons says, it is a disease.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  And it's, one of its defining characteristics is that it sends your brain a message that tells you, you do not have a disease.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  You know, if someone tells you, you have cancer, and there's a chance you're gonna die from it unless you do something, not only do people jump to help you, but you jump to help yourself. Yes, there's a handful, you know, I, I have had friends, parents who have gotten, you know, bad news at the end of their life and said, you know something, I'm not gonna pursue wellness, I've had two hip replacements, I'm done, I'm 90 years old, you know, let's pursue a different way. But for the most part, people seek help. You know, with alcoholism and drug addiction, the first time anybody tells you, hey dude, you've got a problem, you know, it, it, you, you can't stop, it's a, it's a compulsion, it's an allergy, it's a, it's, it is defined by its strange mental blank spots that tell you, you don't have a problem.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  That's the tough thing. I wish all it took was a good conversation and that nodding realization, but I can't tell you how many people sat at the end of my bed, metaphorically speaking, told me what my problem was, told me there was a solution, you know, be abstinent, go to meetings, talk to other people, get help, do every, do the opposite of the things your brain is telling you. You know, every version of that conversation, I nodded my head every time and said, absolutely, I'm gonna do that. And then I, you know, I could do it for a day, two days, three days, and then I'd be right back out there. Sometimes be right back out there five minutes later. I got arrested once and the judge was giving me a big lecture and I looked up at the judge and I said, "F you, your honor", and I started screaming at him. And the reason that I was, was I didn't want to hear what

• 47:37Speaker 03

  he was saying, but the real reason that I was doing it was I knew that he was gonna slam his gavel and throw me back inside to the county jail, which was on the other side of that courthouse door. And inside that county jail were people with dope and booze and all the things that I wanted to get away from me and to quiet that voice in my head and, you know, to, to not be feeling what I was feeling. And that is sad and tawdry, but it's, it's the truth. I just wanted to get high more than I wanted to sit there and listen to his, his lecture. Um, no one can tell someone they should quit. Um, life

• 48:19Speaker 03

  has a way of, which is the horror of the disease. Life, however, has a way of, of humbling you. And for me, at a certain point, it wasn't, you know, my parents thought I was dead. I'd lost every job. I was physically ill and disgusting. I mean, I, oh, you list all the things. I couldn't hold a job. I couldn't, I couldn't do anything. Couldn't function. I was dying and I wanted to die. And at the end of the day, for the first time ever in my life, I put the cork in the bottle because the, the last people that in my, in my heart I, I loved and wanted to respect me, walked out the door. At the end of the day, it was their tough love and realizing that I had no more relationships

• 49:02Speaker 03

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

• 49:42Tim Ferriss?

  Well, this is something I'd love to explore more. I know you have some time constraints today, but we'll have to do a part two at some point.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  I'd love that.

• 49:52Tim Ferriss?

  I hope, at the very least, and I'll ask maybe one or two very fast closing questions, but that people listening to this realize that there might be light at the end of the tunnel. And I've had some very, I've talked about some of my dark moments before, but I've had some extended periods of some pretty terrifying darkness and thoughts not very different from those that you've had. And it's easy to believe that that's all there's going to be indefinitely. So hopefully...

• 50:20Speaker 03

  Well, here's the truth of the matter is that I paint a horrible and disturbing picture of it, where there is no help, nothing can convince the alcoholic or the drug addict that there is another way, except that millions of people have gotten sober and solved that problem. No one is terminally unique.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  And so while all the things I said are true, it's also true that there is a solution. And part of that begins with picking up the phone and taking advice from someone else. I mean, to bring it around, and I'm not trying to minimize the impact of these things, remaining teachable, as I said at the top of our conversation, to me is one of the great things to achieve in life. So when you picked up that phone and very humbly said, I'm now, as someone who, by the way, is brilliant and everyone puts on a pedestal as being one of the great noble thinkers of our time and people who intersect with your books and your other materials have a profound respect for you, and rightfully so,

• 51:26Speaker 03

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

• 52:09Speaker 03

  kind of giving up and saying, "I, I have a problem. I need to, I need to talk to someone about it." Doesn't mean you gotta get sober that day either, but you do have to start to think about the problem you have and about who to talk to about it.

• 52:22Tim Ferriss?

  Andrew, you are a mensch. I appreciate the kind words, obviously. I think it's extremely important advice and I'm glad that we opened up the backstory. I had no idea. And I, I know you have to run. I always appreciate your time.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  No problem. We should, I'll have, I'll have, you should email Jen and let's try to, let's try to do a part two in the, in the short future so you can air them back to back or do something with it, whatever you want to do.

• 52:52Tim Ferriss?

  I would, I would love to do that. And for those people listening to this interview, part one, where, where should they find more about you? Where can they learn?

• 53:02Speaker 03

  Everything is on andrewzimmern.com.

• 53:04Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  It's a really fun website, too. Lots of great recipes, lots of great information, great interviews with people. You know, you can scroll back and, and listen to us having a conversation about you.

• 53:17Tim Ferriss?

  Back in the day.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  All the good things.

• 53:18Tim Ferriss?

  All the good things. Well, Andrew, I, I really enjoyed this and I think a lot of people will benefit from it. So until next time, thank you very, very much. I really appreciate it.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  Take it easy, brother.

• 53:30Tim Ferriss?

  All right, man. Thank you.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  Bye-bye.

• 53:36Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for supporting the sponsors of this show. 99designs, which is your one-stop-shop for all things graphic design-related. Go to 99designs.com/tim to see the projects that I've put up, including the mock-ups and drafts of the book cover for The Four Hour Body. Exoficio, Exoficio and I go way back, exoficio.com/tim. You can see the clothing that I've used for traveling through 20-plus countries, including the underwear. By the way, that's about half of my underwear drawer right now. Exoficio.com/tim. You can also see the viral video that I put out, which shows you how to travel the world with 10 pounds or less. As always, you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, and you can find all of the links

• 54:18Tim Ferriss?

  and resources from this episode, as well as every other episode, by going to fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Spell it all out, or you can go to fourhourworkweek.com and just click on Podcast. Feedback, if you have feedback, I would love your thoughts, anything at all, who you'd like to see on this show. Ping me on Twitter, @tferriss, that's twitter.com/tferriss, or on Facebook, at facebook.com/timferriss, with two R's and two S's. And until next time, thank you for listening.