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The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts

Episode 40: Andrew Zimmern

Show notes and links at tim.blog/podcast

Tim Ferriss: Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say on a bright Hawaiian Christmas day…

Oh! 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. 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. At least I had a blast doing it, and

I hope you do as well. But first, I do get asked about tea. I said assed, as if

it's 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 "assed" 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.

It is from Living Tea, which is a really interesting organization. You can

check them out at livingtea.net. It is a 1960s hui an sheng puerh. The word

sheng, by the way, means uncooked or raw or fresh. It is the same

character that is the [foreign language] in Japanese. It is also the sei of

sensei. So if you have sensei (like teacher in Japanese), it literally means

born before. So before born is the sei of sheng, okay?

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

[foreign language] or mister, like Mr. Cheng in Chinese. Pretty funny

stuff. The perhaps most amusing example is [foreign language], which in

Japanese is letter. You write someone a letter, a love letter. That is

[foreign language], but that is [foreign language] 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/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,

an incredible teacher. You've probably seen his show Bizarre Foods or

Dining with Death. 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. 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.

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.

Tim Ferriss: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen! This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another

episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm very excited to have Andrew

Zimmern with us. Andrew, it is so nice to have you on the phone.

Andrew Zimmern: Thank you very much, Tim. Good to talk to you.

Tim 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 on television, where…

Andrew Zimmern: 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 you do. 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 that's the

core of your stuff, that's what I take from it in its broadest possible sense.

So I think it's doubly charming that you actually practice what you preach.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I appreciate it. 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.

That's part of what I want to explore today.

Andrew Zimmern: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: 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 sort of sequentially or in parallel. Maybe we could start with just a

couple a rapid-fire questions. Then I want to dig into some of your

background.

Andrew Zimmern: Sure, and let's not assume that the way I'm doing it is actually successful. I

mean, the therapy session can work both ways. I often wake up in the

middle of the night and wonder to myself if the number of balls I'm

juggling is actually in inverse proportion to my ability to make some of

those balls bigger. Visualize that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, no… I was thinking of that and then the plate spinning. I think both

of them are very probative. But you've had some huge successes, and of

course there is a lot behind the scenes that people don't see. I guess just to

start off, and these are in no particular order, 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? What were the models you had

in mind, if any? What were you looking to draw from?

Andrew Zimmern: Oh no, no, no… I definitely did. You know, I grew up watching Great

Chefs of Europe on PBS. It was the first Great Chef series. I loved the

intensity of that and 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 pay attention to, sort of the smartness of

what Michael Palin was doing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Andrew Zimmern: You know, I'm from New York, so when someone says, "What do you

like?" I answer that by saying, "Well, I'll tell you what I don't like." And

what I didn't like was the sort of old-school, late 80s, Rick Steves, Celtic

canned music, watching him walk across the cliffs of Dover getting bigger

and bigger and bigger in the frame, and then breathing, sighing, and

looking out over the ocean, and then saying something to the effect of, "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 was within

my unique ability to deliver. Obviously Rick Steves is an expert on travel

and has been everywhere. He's a legend in the business and pioneered.

And without folks like him, folks like me don't have a job. There's

probably not even a Travel Channel, actually.

But at the end of the day, I thought that anybody could've stood there and

said what he said. You know, you could've paid an actor to deliver those

lines and nobody would've been the wiser. I wanted to do things that were

more what we now call docu-follow. I put all of those sort of things

together.

There was a bit of a Trojan horse involved in my show pitching. I wanted

to make a show that allowed me a platform to talk about patience,

tolerance, and understanding in the world. I wanted to change the tone of

our national conversation away from the things that we don't have in

common toward the things that we do have in common. I wanted to make

a show that railed against the vile human frailty of contempt prior to

investigation.

So if you go and pitch that and then sort of launch into this travel-food

idea, everyone shows you the door. So I basically tried to sell a food-

culture show with the hook: stories from the fringe. It ended up being

called Bizarre. The original title for it was Chew on This, but Eric

Schlosser, in one of the children's version of one of his books, was called

that.

I very much snuck a show in the door knowing that if it was successful, I

would get leverage. I would be able to sort of morph the show into what it

sort of is today. It has taken me 200 shows and 8-9 seasons, but I think the

last couple of years we have really done a fantastic job of representing

cultural storytelling through food in the right way.

Tim Ferriss: I'm looking at some notes I took down after one of our first

therapy sessions in my direction, and I found a lot of it so helpful. One of

the recommendations was (I'm paraphrasing, of course) that the most

important thing is to be you, not your inner actor. Be yourself and keep it

within your area of expertise. The line that really stuck with me was how

episode 1 is how you're going to have to be, so…

Andrew Zimmern: Episode 1, moment 1. You can never take that back. There were a whole

bunch of things involved in there, and to tell people sort of 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. It's a whole different skill set. It's a

whole different set of muscles. You and I have talked many times,

sometimes late at night from continents far, far away, about how to

approach this kind of work and help to make it successful.

I think I told you the story of episode 1, show 1. It actually was the pilot. I

went to the Asadachi, which is a restaurant in Tokyo that the translation

for the name means morning erections. True. It's a getemono bar. The kind

of place where businessmen close deals and drink a lot. They are tiny little

izakaya where the food is very, very strange and is meant to, "If you eat

snake bile, I'll eat snake bile," and then the deal will be done sort of thing.

It's a place where guys get drunk and eat crazy food and then go off

whoring for the rest of the day and have their #2 sign the contract.

So we go to this place, and the very first thing they had me do was a

standup outside the building and then walk in the door. There was a part of

me that had all the funniest lines about making fun of their name.

Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by standup?

Andrew Zimmern: The little walk-and-talk. The camera catches me walking down the street.

This is very 1999 TV. The camera is walking down the street. The talent

stops, looks towards the camera, delivers a couple of lines to set up with

the audience is going to see, and then walks in the door. The camera stays

on the door. The door swings shut behind them, and the camera tilts up

and catches the name of the establishment.

Tim Ferriss: Got it.

Andrew Zimmern: Right?

Tim Ferriss: Yep.

Andrew Zimmern: We no longer make our show that way, but that's the way everyone did it

in 1999-2000, when we were contemplating the pilot and then ended up

shooting it right before September 11. It was the first pilot.

Tim Ferriss: Sorry to interrupt. So you were thinking of all these lines to deliver related

to the name of the place.

Andrew Zimmern: Yeah. You know, you can make fun of these people. It's the easy go-to.

You see people do it all the time on TV. A little voice inside my head said,

"Don't do it, because if you do that, you're going to have to come up with

those lines all the time. You're going to be someone you're not. All you

wanted to do your whole life was…" 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. It's the easiest way.

Tim Ferriss: The cheap applause.

Andrew Zimmern: Yeah. All I did was I sort of walked up and turned and said some benign

line and walked in the door. The moral of the story being that I didn't have

to make fun of the people, make fun of their food, make fun of the name.

And it has turned out to be the best decision I ever made because not only

does the show stand (and my brands) 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 thing for all of us when we are travelers,

but it is so much less work just to be yourself. You don't have to change

that.

There are lots of people who have hosted shows on Travel Channel, Food

Network, etc., who are not experts in their field. They do a soul-food

cooking show, but if you ask them what johnnycakes are, they couldn't tell

you…unless they did script and the researchers had filled them in the day

before. It's a very, very strange world on television. Some people are just

presenters. You, on the other hand, me, Tony, Alton Brown… There are a

handful of people out there. These are folks who have been doing their

content for years before the TV camera came on. We just get to be

ourselves.

Tim Ferriss: One of the aspects of your work that I've always appreciated is how

genuinely interested you seem because you are genuinely interested.

Andrew Zimmern: Yeah. That's me.

Tim Ferriss: Just as a side note… I have a buddy who runs a bunch of restaurants and a

few of his companies do a lot of catering. At one point, they had one of the

most famous Italian chef personalities on TV hosting an event. They

called this chef's assistant and asked for her meatball recipe. They said,

"What meatball recipe?" It was such an eye-opening, sort of jaw-dropping

experience for this guy. So yes, certainly, what you see is not always what

you get.

On the cooking side of things, just to throw in some randomness to this, if

you had to choose (I was going to say for the rest of your life) for the next

year, three herbs or spices to cook with, to experiment with (and you can

modify the question), what would you choose?

Andrew Zimmern: I can't exist without hot chilies, shallots, and citrus…lemon. I'll pick

lemon.

Tim Ferriss: Citrus lemon. Hmm…

Andrew Zimmern: You know, the world of herbs and spices is great, but before that, there are

some other building blocks that I would prefer to have in my kitchen or

my desert island. I'm going to assume on my island that you've stranded

me on that I have access to, that I can walk down to the ocean and grab

some seaweed or fish or throw rocks at birds, and get something over a

fire. So the first three things I would want to have with me are hot chilies,

shallots or some kind of onion (I happen to prefer shallots of all the

Allium), and citrus (I generically choose lemon above the others). With

those things, I can do everything.

Sure, I can pick cumin or cilantro or basil or things like that, but they have

fairly limited use. With the lemon, chilies, and an Allium or shallot, I can

do anything. I can do ceaseless variations on them. 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 am overthinking the question,

but that's my gut instinct to go with those.

Tim Ferriss: No, you're not overthinking it at all. I love asking this question because I

still consider myself a novice cook, certainly, but in doing research for the

4-Hour Chef, the citrus really blew my mind. I think I either read or had

someone say to me, "I use citrus the way a lot of people use salt." I was

like, "Huh. That's a really interesting way to think about it."

Andrew Zimmern: Absolutely. Well, salt is an acid and citrus is an acid, and there is an

incredible amount of acid in all the Alliums. There is an incredible amount

of acid in all of the chilies. It's no secret as to why those things are food-

changing, food-altering, technique- inspiring ingredients to use. Much

more versatile in the kitchen than basil or thyme or something like that.

When I talk to young cooks about balancing a dish, its texture contrast, its

temperature contrast, and the way you build flavor contrast and create a

more symphonic taste experience is by experimenting with acids and fats,

so by its very nature, chilies and shallots and lemons and salt and sugar are

the kinds of things we use in different forms, but they are very acidic and

they provide much more flavor when we're cooking than most people give

them credit for.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, definitely. 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 for many, many years. Just the ability to take something

like chilies… A friend of mine gave me some Thai chilies that she was

growing in her garden and just sort of sautéing them in cooking oil for a

few minutes before using that oil for something else totally changes the

dish. It's really so much fun to…

Andrew Zimmern: It's so funny you used that example. I was about to talk about lemon juice

the same way. Sometimes with my wife's roast chicken… She stuffs her

cavity with lemon and herbs and garlic, and that lemon roasts and it starts

to break down, and it boils and 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 to the olive-oil-based pan

sauce that she makes for that dish. It seasons the roast vegetables that she

puts in them.

But then when it comes to the table, that lemon flavor, because heat has

been applied to it and sort of kicks down the impact of the citrus, she then

will finish the dish with a little bit of fresh citrus and olive oil. We do that

a lot in our family. You then have two or three or four (depending on what

bite you take) different variations on that same ingredient lemon in that

dish. It creates a layered experience, which is much more sensual and a

deeper flavor. It's more fully realized.

That's the difference between the kind of roast chicken that… You know,

everyone says, "Why is Jonathan Waxman's chicken at Barbuto so frickin'

awesome? It's because even though it just looks like roast chicken with a

little bit of sea salt and salsa verde drizzled over some of the pieces, there

is so much difference 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 exist. It's profound. I think that's the beauty of food.

It's like art.

I remember sitting in my Northern European painting class as a freshman

at Vassar College, trying to focus on the first day of school instead of the

girl's backside sitting in the desk in front of me. The professor put a

picture up on the wall. It was some 16th-century Northern European

portrait painter. It was a woman standing at a window. There was a table

in front of her with a bowl of fruit. It was a sunny day outside through the

window. She said, "Everyone write down what you see and know about

this painting."

Everyone wrote down the same 10 things that were in there. There was a

dog. She was wearing a blue dress. There was a bowl of fruit on the table.

Then my professor 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 these people were wealthy.

They were traders.

There was symbolism, but there were also… She approached it like

Sherlock Holmes. I learned that day, because I was also cooking a lot at

the time… It reminded me of what a lot of chefs were saying and what

my dad would tell me when I was eight years old in a little sleepy

brasserie in Les Halles in Paris picking bigorneau with a big silver metal

toothpick.

I began to realize I could tell stories about life through food. 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 are sort of geekishly talking about lemon, I think it

underlines and underscores the fact that today in America we fetishize

food in a way that is greater and deeper and probably 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.

Tim Ferriss: No, I agree. I want to explore that a bit, but before we do…shallots. All

right. So I am 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?

Andrew Zimmern: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: It is? Okay. I would love for you to elaborate because that always has been

for me, and I consider my knife skills pretty decent, but it has still been

challenging for me.

Andrew Zimmern: How so? In a recipe that requires them to be minced or sliced thin?

Tim Ferriss: Exactly, which most of the recipes I've come across seem to require that,

so I would love for you to… I can do it, but it's not my favorite prep work

to do.

Andrew Zimmern: Well, there are two issues at hand. One is how you use a shallot and what's

required of it, despite what a certain recipe will tell you. The other one is

your knife skills in particular.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Andrew Zimmern: You are no different than any other person who loves to cook and wants to

get better. If you loved golf and you were playing golf all the time and you

told your friends, "My putting just isn't great," they would 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." They would laugh at you.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Andrew Zimmern: I always tell people when they're cooking if you love to cook, buy big

bags of carrots, onions, and celery, and every day, mince them, cut them

into batons, dice them (when you're sitting around listening to the radio for

10 minutes) and practice your knife skills. If you do that for two weeks,

you will improve the amount time… And gosh don't I know how you love

saving time…

Tim Ferriss: I do.

Andrew Zimmern: That investment in yourself, a front-side investment in time, a lifetime of

time saving. My wife always marvels. She says, "It takes you half the time

to make a recipe." I've been cooking a lot longer than she has, but the

more she practices knife skills, the faster it becomes for her because that's

the sort of mundane… Stop simmering 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 [inaudible], so some of that is knife

skills and some of that is how you organize your kitchen. There are a lot of

things that you can do to speed things up, but practice is something that

helps.

The second thing might be equipment. I'm just going to assume with as

many food geek friends as you have that you have the right knife for

yourself. But I use a short chef's knife. It's usually about eight inches as

my handy sort of go-to knife. I use a thin-bladed one so 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. I can even choke up and tourne a

mushroom if I need to. But I can do almost everything with that one knife.

Then the third issue for this really becomes the mythology of food and

why we believe certain people when they tell us we have to do a certain

thing. To a large degree, you do a lot of myth busting and you find out in

reading all your stuff that there's always something that is perceived to be

a truth that it turns out once you investigate it and talk about it with other

experts, it turns out you don't need to go from A to B to C to D to get to

point E. Sometimes you do. 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.

I don't think there's anything wrong with people using a Benriner or a

mandolin, some of those vegetable slicers, where you put the blade on it

thin setting, and you can shave that shallot into tiny little pieces. There's

nothing wrong with using that. Stack up those slices and then rock your

knife across it a couple of times, and you will have a micro dice that

would rival anything that Masaharu Morimoto can create.

My wife reads recipes, and I'll see her doing something. I'll say, "Why are

you cutting the shallot that way? Why are you cutting the carrot that

way?" She'll say, "Oh, it says so." And I read the recipe, and I'm like,

"Well, there's no need. You can just peel them and leave them whole in

the oven. If you slice them into little coins, they're just going to disappear

in the pan."

You know, a lot of recipes, except from the 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 busywork.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, definitely. One thing that blew me away (this just blew my mind) is

how poorly most recipes perform when you have half a dozen people

recipe testing them.

Andrew Zimmern: Oh, yes.

Tim Ferriss: I could not believe and how poorly almost every recipe performed.

Because I had for the 4-Hour Chef, people at high altitude/low humidity in

Aspen versus people in Georgia or Florida because I wanted to see how

that would affect things, and you would find out that in many cases,

somebody would go to a famous restaurant, a writer (certainly not faulting

them for that), take a recipe that is designed for 200 covers, massive

quantities of food, and then simply use division to take it down to a

serving for two or four people. Man, a lot of it just didn't make any sense

at all. It's nice to hear you say that.

Also, as a piece of trivia, I'm not sure if the brand talks about it, but the

Benriner (the Bendy) means convenient in Japanese. That's why it's called

that. It's a hell of a device, but you have to watch your fingers.

Andrew Zimmern: Well, you do, but you also learn to leave the tails on your shallot and hold

onto that, and then at the very end… You're not handling rock cocaine. I

mean, you know, it's a shallot. That last little quarter-inch, just throw it

away.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Andrew Zimmern: It's amazing to me that a lot of people (not Martha Stewart) knock

magazine recipes whether it's Rachael Ray's or even Food and 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.

When I look at recipes and suggest them for my wife… She'll say, "Oh,

it's a great recipe for pound cake." We go on the Internet, and there are 20

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 they have gone through it. The person who writes a

recipe that says, "Grease the cake pan," you know, they haven't made it.

It's a tip off right away that something is wrong.

Tim Ferriss: Definitely. It reminds me a lot of the David Lee Roth anecdote about the

brown M&Ms. He wanted to have all the brown M&Ms removed from the

M&Ms that would be in the trailer waiting for him, because (I mean, he's a

crazy person, but aside from that) it was anecdotally to ensure that the

people managing the tour would read that level of detail in the contract,

and 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. I

agree with you. Like, "Get a medium-sized sauce pan." What does that

mean to a novice?

Andrew Zimmern: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: To shift gears just a little bit, you went to a great school (Vassar). You

traveled, it sounds like, as a child or a young man, to Paris.

Andrew Zimmern: Yeah, my dad was in the international advertising business, so when I was

six years old, I started going to Europe three or four times a year, mostly

with him. Sometimes just for three or four days at a time. I am a paler

version of him. He loves to eat and travel and drink and told stories in the

day when you needed to command a dining room table with great

storytelling if you were that kind of person who 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.

Tim Ferriss: I think 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 noticed, and I'm embarrassed I

didn't know this earlier, is it seems like you were homeless for a period of

time. I was hoping that you could comment…

Andrew Zimmern: Oh, I was a f***ing mess. You know, I grew up in a very idyllic

surrounding. 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, my parents divorced. My dad and mom separated;

there was a lot of curiosity as to why because there wasn't any fighting our

house. It wasn't anything unusual. My dad was coming to grips with his

own sexuality and sexual preferences, and thank God, he 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 in the state of Maine

where they finally passed the Marriage Equality Act.

But it was a big struggle, and it was really impactful for a six-year-old in

1967. It was a different world than it is today. My mom had an operation

in a hospital to get an appendix scar removed in '74 when the bikini lines

went down. 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 them.

I was sort of raised in an empty house by a bunch of handlers who made

sure I got to school in the morning. I saw my dad on weekends and my

step dad; they were together by that point. I was sort of the ultimate

latchkey kid. I didn't have a lot of direction, and I was really pretty

miserable and didn't know it.

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. The first time in my limited number

of years on the planet, I felt comfortable in my own skin. I had a really

horrible disease called more, so by the time I got to college, I was a daily

heroin addict.

In my first week of college, I was hospitalized with alcohol poisoning and

arrested for narcotics possession. The school that I was at did an intake on

me. They paid for a chemical dependency evaluation. I registered chronic

on the Jellinek scale. The counselor told me at that time, "You're going to

die. Addicts and alcoholics of your variety wind up in jails, institutions, or

dead. You've already done jail time." Which I had. "You've already been

institutionalized." Which at that point I had. "So there's really nowhere

else for you to go."

You tell that to an 18-year-old kid, and they just laugh at you. I laughed at

him. I didn't sober up until I was 31, and things got progressively worse.

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 in that meeting, I told the guy, "No, I don't have a problem," to

when I finally had my last intervention that started the sobriety almost 23

years ago, I just told them I didn't care.

That was a horrible spot. Those last three or four years of my using, I was

in that I-don't-care spot. I wanted to die. 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 to keep the rats and roaches off of me when I

passed out.

I stole purses on streets. I was a mess. It's really sad. Most people just see

the face of the addiction as that person. You know, I was living in an

abandoned building. I didn't shower for a year. I was disgusting. I took

meals in shelters. I got clothes at the Salvation Army. I mean, I was a

garden-variety street person in New York, the type that you cross the

block to avoid. I wasn't pushing a shopping cart, but I was filthy and stank

and was wearing rags.

Ultimately, I went into a hotel to try to drink myself to death. It didn't

work. I had a moment of clarity for the first time in a 15-year period and

called a friend and asked for help. Two days later, I tried to talk him out of

that help, of course, once he gave it to me, like any alcoholic. I asked for

someone to throw me a life preserver, and then I tossed it back at him

because I didn't like the color orange. I immediately was sent to a

beautiful Center City, Minnesota to a treatment center called Hazelden,

which is how I ended up in Minnesota.

Tim Ferriss: I was wondering.

Andrew Zimmern: I was a born-and-bred New Yorker. You know, I had a couple of friends

who had come through… Why am I lying to you? Half of my high school

went through Hazelden. We all went right from Studio 54 together to

treatment together. My friends told me, "You have nothing to go home for.

You've never been able to make your life really work."

I had been successful in the restaurant business in New York, and I had

done a lot in a career because I was talented. You know, I was the guy

who could put out 500 plates of poached eggs at brunch in a busy Central

Park West restaurant. I could stand there and sling it on the line in a three-

star Michelin restaurant in New York. In those days, they did not have a

Michelin Guide there, but you get the drift. I worked in those kinds of

places with those kinds of chefs.

It was that skill set that kept me employed, but ultimately, my alcoholism

and drug addiction stuck me in Minnesota. So I kept thinking I would go

back. I worked for year and a half for Thomas Keller at Rakel, and I'd

worked for Anne Rosenzweig at Arcadia and great chefs in New York

City, many of whom fired me after a day of working because they caught

onto my s***. A lot of them didn't.

But I wanted to come back to New York and give it another try, but my

friends said, "Don’t do it. Stay in Minnesota. Do something different." So

I started here and ended up opening up a restaurant that became very

successful. I left that. I got into the media business because I felt like there

was an opportunity there that if I didn't seize it, the door would kind of

shut forever on that kind of opportunity, just because I saw the popularity

of food and media in that intersection, and I wanted to be a part of it early

on.

Tim Ferriss: How old were you at that point?

Andrew Zimmern: Oh gosh… 14 years ago I stopped. I was in the restaurant business here in

Minneapolis the first seven years that I lived here.Then I spent a couple of

years consulting, and at that time I was working for free for a local radio

station doing a food show, a TV station where I was a morning chef on

one of those wacky local morning shows. It was the best job I ever had.

I learned how to read, write, and think critically when it came to doing

television. I learned how to edit. I learned what a cameraman had to do. I

learned how to produce a segment. I learned how to behave on camera and

not be self-conscious. It was the best training I ever had for the job that I

do now.

I worked at a magazine doing restaurant writing and essay writing about

food. I did five or six little blurbs and columns as part of a three-person

dining section staff for our local glossy monthly here in Minneapolis St.

Paul magazine. I had a great editor who taught me how to write again. I

was the luckiest guy in the whole world.

Tim Ferriss: That is an incredible story, and it gives me a lot to think on. One of the

questions that immediately jumped to mind for me was if you had the

opportunity to interact with someone who was exactly where you were at

age 18 or 20, is there a way to persuade that person to avoid that descent

into despair and destitution? Because…

Andrew Zimmern: You know the answer to that question is no.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, well, that's why I'm asking.

Andrew Zimmern: No, no. I have that opportunity all the time. I mean, I am very active in a

12-step group, and 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 problems that alcoholics and addicts have.

The question that you pose is that alcohol and drug addiction has a major

component. In fact, the defining component of those diseases (and it is a

disease, despite what Gene Simmons say, is that it sends your brain a

message that tells you you do not have a disease. You know, if someone

tells you you have cancer and there's a chance you're going to die from it

unless you do something, not only do people jump to help you, but you

jump to help yourself.

Yes, there is a handful… I have had friends/parents who have gotten bad

news at the end of their life and said, "You know something, I'm not going

to pursue wellness. I've had two hip replacements. I'm done. I'm 90 years

old. Let's pursue a different way." But for the most part, people seek help.

With alcoholism and drug addiction, the first time somebody tells you,

"Hey dude, you've got a problem," you can't stop. It's a compulsion. It's an

allergy. It is defined by its strange mental blind spots that tell you you

don't have a problem. That's the tough thing.

I wish all it took was a good conversation and then 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. Get help. Do the

opposite of the things your brain is telling you." Every version of that

conversation, I nodded my head every time and said, "Absolutely. I'm

going to do that." Then I could do it for a day, two days, three days, and

then I would be right back out there. Sometimes I would 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. The reason was I didn't want to hear what he was

saying. But the real reason I was doing it was I knew he was going to slam

his gavel and throw me back inside of the county jail, which was on the

other side of the courthouse, and inside that county jail were people with

dope and booze and all the things I wanted to get away from me, to quiet

the voice in my head and to not be feeling what I was feeling.

That is sad and tawdry, but it's the truth. I just wanted to get high more

than I wanted to sit there and listen to his lecture. No one can tell someone

they should quit, which is the horror of the disease. Life, however, has a

way of humbling you. For me, at a certain point… My parents thought I

was dead. I had lost every job. I was physically ill and disgusting. You can

list all the things. I couldn't hold a job. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't

function. I was dying, and I wanted to die.

At the end of the day, for the first time ever in my life, I put the cork in the

bottle because the last people that in my heart I loved and wanted to

respect me walked out the door. At the end of the day, it was their tough

love and realizing I had no more relationships and that I had really lost

everything 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

I spoke to said something to me that essentially said, "You don't know the

answer to everything. You can walk up the door and get hit via bus, or you

could by the winning lottery ticket. You don't know. You don't know what

life has to offer." For some reason, that made sense to me at that point and

got me one more day. Then one more day and one more day. And now I

have been sober for 23 years.

Tim Ferriss: Well this is something I would love to explore more. I know you have

some time constraints today, but we'll have to do a part two at some point.

Andrew Zimmern: I would love that.

Tim Ferriss: I hope, at the very least, and I'll ask one or two very fast closing questions,

that people listening to this realize there might be light at the end of the

tunnel. I've talked about some of my dark moments before, but I have had

some extended periods of some pretty terrifying darkness and thoughts not

very different from those that you've had. It's easy to believe that that's all

there's going to be indefinitely. So hopefully…

Andrew Zimmern: The truth of the matter is I paint a horrible and disturbing picture of it

where there is no help, and 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, so while all

the things I said are true, it's also true that there is a solution. Part of that

begins by picking up the phone and taking advice from someone else.

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 pick up the phone

and very humbly said… By the way, if someone is brilliant and everyone

puts on a pedestal as being one of the great, noble thinkers of our time and

people intersect with your books and your other materials have a profound

respect for you, and rightfully so, 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?" That's how we started our friendship.

For people out there who are struggling or have a family member who is

struggling, there is a solution. You know, on our website

andrewzimmern.com, we have some links to different treatment centers to

AA's general service number. You can call a local hospital. You can stop a

policeman in the street and say, "Help me."

It is a world built out there for us to get out of ourselves and raise the

white flag. That's the very, very first step. It's saying, "I give up. I have a

problem. I need to talk to someone about it." It doesn't mean you need to

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.

Tim 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. I know you have to run. I always appreciate your

time.

Andrew Zimmern: No problem. You should email Jen, and let's try to do a part two in the

short future so you can air them back to back or do something with it.

Whatever you want to do.

Tim Ferriss: I would love to do that. For those people listening to this interview, part

one, where should I find more about you? Where can they learn more

about you?

Andrew Zimmern: Everything is on andrewzimmern.com.

Tim Ferriss: Perfect.

Andrew Zimmern: It's a really fun website too.

Tim Ferriss: It is.

Andrew Zimmern: Lots of great information. Great interviews with people.You know, you

can scroll back and listen to us having a conversation about you.

Tim Ferriss: Back in the day. All the good things. Well, Andrew, I really enjoyed this. I

think a lot of people will benefit from it, so until next time, thank you

very, very much. I really appreciate it.

Andrew Zimmern: Take it easy, brother.

Tim Ferriss: All right, man. Thank you.