Lessons from Geniuses, Billionaires, and Tinkerers

Optimal minimum altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

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

This episode has brought you buy audible, which I've used for years.

I love audio books and I've to to recommend right off the bat.

Number one is pressed my favorite audiobook of all time.

And that is the graveyard book by Neil Gaiman The only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished.

It's amazing.

You will thank me.

The graveyard book.

The second is Vagabond by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life in form the basis for a lot of what became the 4-Hour Work week.

So all you need to do to get your free 30-day trial is go to audible.

com forward slash Tim and you can choose one of those two bucks the graveyard book bag bonding or more than 180,000 audio programs.

So that could be a book that could be a magazine that could be a newspaper could be a class.

It's that easy go to audible.

com Tim.

That's audible.

com Tim and grab a book.

Enjoy.

This episode is brought to you by wealthfront.

And this is a very unique sponsor wealthfront is a massively disruptive in a good way set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologist for places, like apple and world famous investors.

It has exploded in popularity in the last 2 years and they now have more than two and a half billion dollars under management.

In fact, some of my very good friends investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in wealthfront.

Why is so popular why is it unique? Because you can get service has previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them and this because he's smarter software instead of retail locations bloated sales team to Tedder and I'll come back to that in a second.

I suggest you check out wealthfront.

com forward Tim take the risk assessment quiz, which one takes two to five minutes and I'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they put you out and if you just want to take their advice run with it do it yourself, you can do that or as I would you can set it and forget it and here's why the Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis but normally aren't great investing is a marathon not a Sprint and little things that you may or may not be familiar.

That's like automatic tax-loss harvesting rebounds in your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time wealthfront as I mentioned since using software instead of retail locations Etc can offer all of this at low cost that were previously completely impossible right off the bat.

You never pay commissions or canopies for everything.

They charge .

25% per year on assets above the first 15,000 which is managed for free if you use my link wealthfront.

com Tim that is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account for now.

Normally when I have a sponsor on the show is because I use them and recommend them in this case to little different.

I don't use wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to here's the deal.

They wanted to sponsor this.

Podcast but because of SEC regulations companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonial so I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast but I've been so impressed by wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money at least for me in the team in the company itself.

So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client not back to the recommendation as a Tim Ferriss show.

You'll get $15,000 Mansion for free if you decide to open an account, but just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you take 2 minutes fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.

com.

Tim fast free.

There's no downside that I can think of Waka waka waka you Soulja Savages.

This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show.

Where is my job to deconstruct world-class performers where they are from the worlds of Chess entertainment military politics Athletics business or otherwise in this episode is a fun one.

It took place in my home on my couch with t and it involves lessons from tinker's Geniuses and billionaires and the interviewee is Chris Young and we talked about quite a few things what he's learned from people like Bill Gates Nathan myhrvold and perhaps a name you don't recognize but in many ways the most impressive to me self-made billionaire Gabe Newell, and if you don't know who he is, you should learn all about it and we will get into it Neal Stephenson the science fiction author saying it that way doesn't do justice to the work that he puts out which is incredible snow crash and someone will touch on that and questions above all we focus on Good questions.

We focus on better thinking and we focus on for instance.

How do Geniuses can people who run for instance? They eat number one ranked restaurant the world Express disappointment how to express disappointment and ensure that you correct yourself.

How has Chris managed to get jobs working for some of these people are the best in the world despite? No credentials at the time that he got the job and how do you record create apocalyptic BBQs very important question.

We'll get into that and risk having the entire neighborhood burned out.

Of course, I would never suggest such a thing, but the story makes for a good time and bringing to get into it.

So, please enjoy this.

Why don't you conversation with Chris Young and will take you from Xtreme Aviation and world record goals to mathematics biochemistry and everything between so Fuk it.

I left myself with no out on this one.

Enjoy.

Christopher welcome to the show.

Thanks.

Damn excited to be here.

Very cool.

It's been not too too long since we've hung out.

I mean we saw each other in Seattle and that was Sam's Matt mullenweg.

Yes.

I'm actually impressed.

You remember any of that? There was a bit of drinking.

Well not to not to point fingers, but I'd say whenever we hang out there's always some form of drinking this seems to sneak in.

It might be a chef thing.

But before we get to the chef thing and I suppose this is related, but you have a myriad of obsessions that that strike me as interesting ringgit to this.

But since we were talking about the drinking and Seattle incident that I thought was retelling of your personality and kind of hilarious was this dinner that we had for a few people who had won prizes to be brought to Seattle to have this incredible dinner and there's a family with a bunch of kids in the mom was talking about making smoothies.

And I just as before we start recording I said you don't need to feel that you have to censor yourself.

Not that that's what you do anyway, and I just remember after she'd finished this like heartfelt description of hurt her smoothies vegetable smoothies you said well, you know vegetables are trying to kill you about vegetables.

Can you elaborate on why why that is the case? Sure.

So the idea I think I probably said something to the effect of U Know salad the silent killer which which is actually not originally made the Edsel other the great food writer, Jeffrey steingarten had had a brilliant article about this.

But anyways, that sort of a biology background.

This makes some intuitive sense.

It's just one of these things we don't stop to think about If you're a plant like you're not looking to get eaten like that's not a good outcome for you.

And so you you can't run.

So you do all sorts of things to Duvall some protection against all these Predators running around trying to eat you so it turns out if you're stuck in the ground and you can't run you going to evolve this really elaborate chemical weapons system that when a pass or a disease or a critter basically starts to know on your roots or non your stocks or non your leaves none of which are the part that you want to have eaten you going to try to poison them and so a whole bunch of things like fava beans, you know, if you eat them raw people die every year from eating too many raw fava beans apple seeds have Trace Amounts of of cyanide not enough to be an issue for a human but fork for pasture, even when a fruit bruises and it started turns out unsightly Brown that's a cascading enzymatic chemical reaction designed to create a bunch of molecular compounds.

Prevent spoilage.

So there's all these people that think eating raw vegetables is like this inherently healthy somehow more pure Act of eating and it's like no you're eating mostly a bunch of toxins and poisons and things that like they may not affect you because you're a pretty large mammal, but mostly they're not that great for you like spinach I think was the example.

I used that people think of Popeye.

Then you get all this iron from spinach like it's part meth.

There's just not that much iron in spinach compared to many other plant food, but also raw spinach contains a ton of oxalic acid, which actually binds iron so people eat a lot of raw spinach they end up with an iron deficiency, and that's what produces that so if I'm not cottonmouth feel but that's how I feel mild in this but Sorel which is it is relatively it has this this quickly if you've ever eaten rhubarb rhubarb very high in it and if you eat raw rhubarb, that hasn't been cooked down a bunch of sugar.

Pair with a bunch of Jami strawberries.

It's a pleasant vegetable but it's it's not as amazing as people think it is and it also can leave you with this cotton mouth.

Especially if you did wrong.

Which which I remember doing is a kitten it wasn't wasn't that great in the same bucket you have now some of these might be from legumes or otherwise but phytic acid and happenings and all these various other thing where you really need to cook them in and actually your best throwing out the water you cook them in one, you know, you're in a fart of the lunch lasts because you're basically diluting down a lot of the illegal sack right that you can't digest but also you're tending to dispense with some of the more water soluble compounds that are very good for us.

So the science you bring a lot of science the table take me through getting to math and biochemistry did that come before or after food and cooking it certainly came.

Well before professionally do it at the cooking thing was something I always did as a kid.

It was just not the kind of thing that somebody going up in the seventies and eighties was like, oh that's a good career choice, like no like growing up in the like aspirational middle middle class like becoming a chef was not a good career choice were not encouraged in that direction and like late 1980s Heartland America science.

I think was always interesting to me.

It was stuff that I gravitated towards but it wasn't the kind of thing that I had a natural aptitude to be quite honest will taking math.

For example, the highest grade.

I think I got in a mathematics class all the way up through high school with a c minus I think partly because I had a On my shoulder about it and I'm partly because mathematics as it existed at the University level.

Once you got Beyond like the weed out classes like no resemblance to what I had seen throughout high school and Junior High and Elementary School.

And so I think I partly got the degree to be able to say see it really was the teachers not me and partly because I actually discovered it was it was actually really elegant and fun and interesting because you were tired of playing these mental games of like what would the world be like if volume no longer has a physical meaning and stuff like that.

So I sort of took University to very indirect approach where I just took things that were interesting to me or I took them because a particular Professor was teaching them that that person was always interested in doing cool as shit.

It happened to be that like after 7 years and I kind of looked around his head like what do I have enough to have a degree in there like that while I kind of have enough to have a degree in pure mathematics and I I have enough to have a degree in Biochemistry and I kind of have enough to sort of have a degree in history.

And so I maybe I should apply for those historical mathematical biochemistry something like that.

When was your first gig out of college with it always strikes me when I'm having these conversations with friends.

It gives me an excuse to ask like the 20 questions.

It would seem utterly weird and creepy if I did it in like normal conversation over wide, but I have no idea.

What was your first job out of college cook.

So, you know the year 2000 and I was starting to pursue a PhD and what I are what I hoped would turn into a PhD and an area code biomolecular structural design.

So specifically it sort of tied together mathematics and physical chemistry and cancer research and computers and and a whole bunch of stuff.

I was kind of sort of interested in But I also sort of I had like a whole bunch of chaos going on in my life with crazy girlfriends one in particular.

So like, you know academically I was getting burned out.

And in the meantime, my personal life was sort of cratering in a super awkward and painful kind of way and I remember summer around September or October 2001.

So after September 11th, I just remember like my life totally imploded like in the course of about a week.

We're like things were going really poorly for my research by the the the principal investigator on the project was that was really like displeased with my working and part of that was I had made some bad choices about the project and part of it was like I was completely distracted about what was imploded in my personal life.

And so it was just for one of these Fuck it.

I'm going to walk away from it with no clear idea.

What the hell I'm going to do.

And I always cook like I enjoyed cooking and I was reading a bunch of I was actually Cookie My Way Through The French Laundry cookbook and I was diving into Harold McGee both of which I discovered around that time.

Let's be the science of cooking on food and cooking the science and lore of the kitchen on food and I was just like this stuff is so awesome.

How did you know I was one of those books I just discovered randomly browsing at Barnes & Noble and if I find out I was just like this thing's cool is a quick Paws for people who've seen the 4-Hour Chef video of the book trailer the movie trailer which shot it at chefsteps, which is in Seattle at with which to Chris's is certainly a straw have to get into it.

But the placeholder that we used for the 4-Hour Chef book because we put it in and post-production was Harold book Harold book about the right side.

Was going on and it was like I have no idea what I'm going to do.

I'm basically walking away from my from from my my grant funding and I got to get my head back together cuz of bad relationship and so I just decided like I enjoy cooking so I'm going to get a job as a chef while I figure out what the hell I'm going to do with my life.

Like that was kind of as far as the master plan went at that point.

And so like I wrote letters to all of the chefs that had restaurants that as far as I could tell what kind of important restaurants in Seattle with like my academic CV being like I am looking for a job and remarkably like some of them actually called me back.

I think mostly to see like if I was having a laugh which of my friends is pranking me, basically it was like this oughta be good for a laugh and it was the chef named Tim Kelly at the painted table who called me up on a Friday and he was like, I got your letter and Now's not really a good time for you to come work for me at the painted table.

I keep quit the next day but I have this friend bill buttlicker as he cooked for David blue Lahey with your science background you and him would probably get a great you should call him up and tell him that I sent you and don't take no for a fucking answer just show up with your knives and start cooking for him.

So like I called William Bellanca something like Tim Kelly said I should call you and definitely come work with you and I he's like this was a Fridays like great.

When can you be here? This is what I really really like.

He just needed anyone who's willing to work for free.

So I showed up at 3 with with like I've gotten a knife bag.

I had a couple nights at that point.

They were like reasonably sharp and like they immediately put me to work doing some really media like pick a bunch of time cut down some chard and like I'd apparently did it mostly right.

I was just incredibly slow.

And at the end of service like, you know, William was really gracious.

He sat down with me in the dining-room.

He had a glass of wine and offered me a glass of wine and he's like, you know now is probably not really great time in Russia have a lot of the work for you and like being very Earnest I was I was like, I totally understand.

Is there anybody in town? You recommend would be a good place we work.

I'm really really like committed to doing this.

I really want to see what it's about and what I didn't realize at the time was like that was probably the perfect thing to have said to William because we have to normalcy you go and he would just not going to be capable of bringing himself to say anybody else in town was any good at all? And so he you could just see him sort of sputtering and really there's no one like I think I'm probably the right person to teach you.

So why don't you come back on Tuesday and accidental Jedi mind trick and then it was just like I showed up and I kept kept showing up and like I Get paid for Elsa my credit card was getting obliterated, but that's how I got into it.

And I discovered that professional cooking is really a mental illness.

You either have it or you don't.

And like within months is like I have to do this there.

There isn't really a choice and that we were Off to the Races your therapy.

That's like the coping mechanism and totally my coping mechanism all of my introverted antisocial behaviors to basically like lock myself up on a Friday and a Saturday in the kitchen because like I could feel like I was out and socializing but I didn't actually have to be out and socializing.

So it was like that with the next eight years or a cultural black hole for me.

So we're going to we're going to jump around as is my want to go to create a podcast.

It's as hard to follow as Memento.

I want to talk about peanut visual picture for people because so we we Flash Forward quite a quite a quite a long ways talk to me about the massive pigs rotating around a fire notes fire rotating around a pig.

Can you explain the spectacle people? Please provide some an end how that came to be.

So I'll try to explain the spectacle and then I'll try to give the why do we do these Shenanigans? So essentially there's a concept of like rotisserie meat and usually you rotate the animal in front of the fire.

And what you're doing is actually solving a very pragmatic problem, which is you have this big giant pig shaped object and the fire can bring heat to the surface much much faster than that heat can diffuse and percolate through the meat itself and every sort of Weekend warrior bad cook.

His experience is prom at some point.

We're like you Char the outside and the inside is still raw black and blue and if you do something the size of a large animal like that phenomenon is exacerbated exponentially and so I wrote in it.

What you do is you bring a bunch of fire to one side and it starts heating up and then before older cook you rotate into the Shadows where it rests in the heat diffuses through it over this dizzy number of Cycles.

You should have time average out.

The temperature should get a crispy service and then added Edge evenly cooked animal and we call this like rotisserie.

It turns out the physics are totally symmetrical that you can rotate the anyone from the fire, but you could also rotate the fire around the animal and aside from the idea that that's just rid of a peeling on its own merits actually saw some practical purposes that like by 4 wood or coal around really really rapidly you're forcing a bunch of air through it are Drive the combustion faster and so the coals get hotter and the harder they get the more intense like they glow and because you're dealing with radiant heat And radiant heat sort of goes by the fourth power of the temperature the hotter.

You can get it like the more intense The Seer and the more just radiates radiant energy, you're dumping out and everybody gets a suntan and it's just awesome and you're flinging Cole everywhere and bits of fire and like dogs are hiding and children are like running around and it it's this post-apocalyptic Wasteland kind of like Mad Max just came to and charge them animals.

So like why wouldn't you do this? And is there a name for this? What is the inverted rotisserie spit and how much space does this the first one which I think is the one you've seen some of the photos of had these two columns that were 8 ft tall stuffed with an thersitical that we we that's a whole string and tell him how you get interested to call and you know, they're spinning around at about 36 RPM on a cement mixer base around a pig sort of vertically.

Did it been spatchcocked in half and was vertically suspended until it's really great where that one is spatchcock flayed open on the sort of medieval like torture device and we're spending the fire around it and it looks like a dissected pig routine Reddit really rapidly.

That was actually up my friend Neal Stephenson's backyard in this is the annual tradition and then I'll come back cuz there's the origin story part 2 this settings.

So ya later reference Neal Stephenson of snow crash cryptonomicon seveneves a whole bunch of other stuff that I haven't read.

So, I've only read one of his book and it's his most recent one because gliding features in it, and I'm the reason now, okay, we'll come back to that.

Yes.

I'm okay.

Anyway, that's also how I met Gabe Newell was the second time I met Gabe I took the dinner for gay but that was kind of it and Gabe was at that party saw the spectacle in goes.

Well, that's fucking awesome.

So we totally need to do that at my house for our Christmas solstice party, but can you make it bigger and sulfur Gabe's house? We scaled it up two stories tall.

We had a chain of hams and pineapples hanging off this this giant.

I beam and Gantry crane and I think it was about 20 foot tall columns that were spinning around this thing and that was called the tornado of fire.

I've decided that this podcast is more like the movie Snatch than the Mentos are in the cast of characters.

So we have Gabe is man of few words self-made billionaire collection of thousands of knives.

I believe it's an enormous collection.

Like I don't know how Matt what will get back to Gabe later because I want to leave that as a teaser.

So the origin so I met Neal Stephenson when I was working with Nathan myhrvold at his invention lab intellectual Ventures.

That's where we are right in modernist cuisine and Nathan had just found it a lab that was supposed to like invent cool shed.

And so like this guy Neal Stephenson, shut up who apparently is really famous, but I had no idea who he was and I would like to sit next to them and I remember coming by being like cuz I was just was like the first book I was running.

I was trying to figure out how to be like a right.

And so I remember coming up to him be like, I understand you're a writer or something is like I understand you're a chef or something and that was kind of the basis for our friendship is like neither of us cared about I like our background and so but we did enjoy drinking a bunch of of English Alan we had to sit over his house and and just chat with him and he had bought bought a new house.

It was like this sort of a mock Tudor mansion that sits on Lake Washington and every summer the first weekend August in Seattle.

We have Seafair weekend would like its Fleet week and there's a bunch of jet boat races in the Blue Angels come to town and this basically all happened right over Neal's house and Neil's this very quiet introverted likes things very mellow kind of guy and he's like, well since basically the entire neighborhood is going to be terrorized for a weekend we might as well just make a party out of that until he coined the idea of having an annual loudness fast and that year he was reviewing his backyard.

So it his backyard Serta look like this look like Beirut after like a surgical airstrike in just happen to his yard, so it wasn't like a big deal that we dug a 6-foot by 6-foot by 6-foot deep pit in his backyard and turned into a jacuzzi tub to to sous-vide cook a 300-pound Pig.

And like each year after that for the next 5 years like each year had to be like more over-the-top more outlandish more ludicrously dangerous dangerous in the sense of maybe the neighbors houses were burned down.

Maybe somebody will be killed by spalling concrete.

Maybe somebody will just be burned to Cinders because like we're cooking with Magma that kind of thing pricing Leaf it dude.

I mean because you think writer you think's add entry but true true or false actually.

No, I would like you to the store so I have to have them on the park at some point, but he does Victorian era exercises that is what I have.

But he does that and he does various forms of what he calls Western martial arts involving sword fighting with a really try to accurately recreate the way it was would have been done.

On what I understand is fairly limited information.

And so yeah, I know Neil I think takes physical fitness like absurdly seriously.

And so it it's it's one of the things that makes him like just awesome and interesting is a person to hang around with of you would think of him as this overly nerdy sci-fi writer and that's totally true.

He's a nerd but he's also fascinated by all of these physical activities.

What did your path look like from the cooking job that you last described to Heston Blumenthal that was a very very short hop and a very lucky one.

But what isn't appreciate is when I started working for Hesston nobody really heard of Hesston.

So you keep paying a picture of shirt, maybe at that.

I don't know if it's today.

80 Heston is a world famous chef rightly.

So more famous outside of the US.

I think that inside the us but he's arguably the most famous chef except for maybe Gordon Ramsay or Jamie Oliver, but certainly at that same level in the United Kingdom and Australia there would be no modernist cuisine without has been there would be frank Lino Noma without Heston Heston was really Noma considered the best restaurant on the way.

So, you know, there's this is basically that restaurant between el Bowie in the early 2000s and and Noma really starting in the in the in the last six or seven years since I've ridden a went to the fat.

Kitchens and the oblique Hitchens.

So that the path for me was was actually pretty straightforward.

I think after about nine months of cooking in Seattle with a very small high-end restaurant not terribly busy, but it was small and sent a very few people on staff.

There's about four or five of us until the good news was like you had to do everything which is fantastic when you are trying to learn to be a cook because I had no formal training was like it was all on the job and it a bigger restaurant you used to compartmentalize down and you can spend a year just doing the same stuff over and over but can he start up? Right? And so, you know by being a small a small restaurant that was just trying to stay afloat like you did everything and there wasn't time to think about bringing one to think about whether you should be doing that but by the end of nine or maybe 10 months I'd realized I was really not going to learn anything more here.

I had sort of maxed out the learning curve and around that time my don't you know you Symptoms of that boredom I think on a certain look at all of I was do I was finding myself repetitive.

I was Finding like I'd set little task for myself that time like it was shallots and I had to get through a bunch of brunoise and had to get a box of up five very fine guys, if I had to get that done I would try to time it and you know be able to do a shallot is Flawless as I could and say 10 seconds of salad or a whole box in 15 minutes or and I realize like those games weren't really that interesting more because I wasn't able to advance team was about as fast as I was going to get or I was repeating them over and over in their work new challenges.

I also found myself.

Struggling with with with with William because I was wanting to push to do more or to try new things on the menu and you know, he was really pushing back and in retrospect I realized those were those were actually just the limits of that business.

They they couldn't take more on they couldn't afford to do necessarily more ambitious things, you know, his job is to keep the lights on and make sure he was was balancing the bills and and that's a very really hard challenge in any restaurant.

And so that was sort of to me the signal of I need to move on somewhere.

There was a bunch of other stuff going on.

I think in the background of I I gotten a book from Michelle Brock all the central Cuisine that came out that year and I'm in English essential essential Cuisine Michelle bra.

It was a three-star Chef in strip.

And I think if you talk to a lot of chefs that came up in the early 2000s will all point of that pit special at the high-end will all point to that book is be like holyfuck.

What was this like nobody had seen? Alaska's brasieres and just I remember looking at me like I don't know anybody in Seattle doing food that looks anything.

I don't know anybody anywhere doing food that looks like this.

You know what I thought about wanted to go cook that restaurant but a I didn't think I was remotely good enough and be I didn't speak any french.

So that wasn't going to make it any easier but it had me thinking about I needed to move on I needed to see more and I knew I wasn't seeing this this kind of stuff here and I thin and so what how did I know what time to leave there was realizing that wasn't really getting any better or any new skills in the restroom, but also because I would like all of my disposable income was going into buying more cookbooks.

I was realizing what I wasn't seeing right? You're seeing the give me the bigger picture of the world and so about that time for Christmas.

Actually my girlfriend her mother gave me an anthology of food writing in 2002 and it was an article in it called the gastronauts and it was talk.

In about this conference in Italy that chefs and scientist got together and we're collaborating to try to invent the future of cooking and in particular.

They had Harold McGee talking about the chef with a name that nobody heard of from England called Heston Blumenthal who is really trying to apply science in his kitchen to do better food to do more delicious food to understand the whys of cooking and I was like that that sounds perfect.

So I wrote a letter mean is is Antiquated as it sounds I wrote a letter or night and I I actually faxed it to them and said like I've heard about you restaurant.

I'm a I'm a Chef cooking in Seattle.

I'd love to come over it to eat and starch basically Apprentice for the weekend in your kitchen just just to see and they said sure So I flew myself over shortly after Valentine's Day 2003.

Is it typical that a restaurant just says sure to request like that actually surprised.

Call me if you ask in the right way.

Now.

If you go to a restaurant, that's oversubscribed.

If you go to like the hottest restaurant, there's a lot line of people they can choose from and they're going to choose the best because that's their recruiting ground.

I don't even think it's a good decision as a chef to go there.

Unless you're already established Because by the time a restaurant gets that famous where there's a line of stars years out the door.

It's a machine.

It has to be everybody's coming.

They're expecting to get the greatest hits get the experience.

And so it's very risky for a restaurant to basically allow us Dodger much Freedom at all that you took what turned out to be perfect was the fat duck had just become a to actually thought it was a one-star when I apply but it had just gotten its second star.

I don't know that I would have had the guts to apply if I'd known they were a two-star.

And they didn't have that many customers and in so I didn't really feel like I was over reaching and that was the bit of luck is it it turned out this was about to become one of the best restaurants in the world.

It was it there's some dumb luck and timing here but sir finish the story I flew myself over by myself cuz that was all I could afford and I remember being very confused about like the geography of England because the fact that is actually west of London Heathrow near a town called me and had it since action tiny little town on the Thames river called Bray.

So I booked myself in a hotel and like West London stupidly and I'm like jet lag when I get to the hotel I check in and then by that time I need to drive right out to the route to the restaurant and this is like my first experience driving on the wrong side of the road and I think the statue of limitation.

Because I also have to drive myself back that night after a lot of wine and not look better for it.

But I got up to the restaurant and Ice they sent me the table of one under stairwell on the restaurant is a 600 year old Pub.

The ceilings are about 7 ft tall very unassuming.

Not what you expect for this this this point.

I knew it was like you're in someone's living room and I think the best way I could describe the meal that night starts with the the the dish that it actually starts with to this day.

The first issue get is the liquid nitrogen poach green tea Sauer & sohn City at this very minimalist white linen table.

Nothing else is sitting on it.

And before they take your order before anything else the waiter Wheels over a year and I'm one of those trolleys up to your table has a cauldron text Theodore bowl of liquid nitrogen boiling away at 200 degrees below zero Celsius any picks up a whipping siphon and dispenses what looks like a dollop of Shaving mousse under the end of a spoon then knocks it into that that cauldron of liquid nitrogen turns it off.

Bass it for exactly 8 seconds and then strains it out and dust it with some green tea matcha powder and hand it over to you on a little a little chill plate Nash you to pick it up and eat it all in one bite and it looks like this little morang and when you bite into it, at least for me, I was just fantastic that the shells would have shatters Chrisley like glass and then it gives away this this luscious moose that's racing with the acidity of lime juice and the astringency of a bit of green tea, but the coolest cars you get the puff of smoke out your nose.

So you look like a smoking Dragon.

There's a video of be experiencing that for the first time in your lab.

If you search Tim Ferriss chefsteps, it'll pop up somewhere.

And so like it sort of you.

Wish your mind like what is this? But you know, the purpose was actually turned out totally reason doubt.

It was you've ever had orange juice in the morning after brushing your teeth.

It tastes awful and it's not because he orange juice changes because your mouth changed and in flavors is idea that actually constructed by your brain from all these sensory inputs.

And so if you take orange juice which is acidic and you drink it after you had a mouth full of alkaline toothpaste it neutralize that acidity it tastes awful.

And if you're trying to be the best wrestler in the world, you kind of want a Level Playing Field to the lime juice in that green tea sour is designed to neutralize any toothpaste residue and the green tea provides these astringent polyphenols to clean cleanse all the soft tissue because maybe you had a cigarette maybe had a packet of chips or something before you came to the restaurant.

So it's basically mouthwash that's this surprising entertaining the light in the rest of the meal like totally did my head in and just blew me away because not only was everything Whimsical and fun and gorgeous to look at but everything was delicious.

And so the end of that night I walked back in there like I will work for free for as long as you will let me work here and What I didn't know was at the time they had no money where they're going bankrupt.

And so they're like sure you said the magic words.

Yes.

So I got back to the hotel that night and I called my girlfriend back and read the Atwoods exactly is a great news Dawn.

I just accepted a job at the back deck.

I'm coming home in a couple days.

I need to pack and I'm back here in a month and all I got was I can't talk about this right now click and she's my wife now, so it didn't work out that bad late, but you can kind of imagine how that went.

She has a high tolerance High built-in tolerance for for Chris Young traits, I guess.

What's what do you learn at the vet tech or if I'm having everything has been passing really became my mentor it is as a chef on my working for 5 years.

I initially work from is an unpaid storage air.

And this was like back in the day when some of the shops were like just out of prison and things like that and it was transitional like we are moving definitely most of the shops were way above above that but there was a few shots were still flaky and so I remember literally a chef just they'd hired him and he didn't show up for work and then like somebody's got to be on that station.

So congratulations you're in that section now and that was like getting promoted for me.

Like I am it was at that time.

I get best sort of a farm team getting promoted to the majors is like have fun.

I got my ass handed to me every day for the next 3 months.

I remember I was the first to arrive at the restaurant at 6:30 in the morning.

We're seven it depending on the day and the wait staff checks at all left the kitchen the wait staff was having to throw me out at the end of the night because I was trying to get ahead of my prep.

Because like I was like this really diligent guy likes it because I need it every bit of extra time because I sucked compared to everyone else.

I didn't know how to be fast enough yet.

I didn't know how to organize my meezan plas list to do things.

He's up Los getting everything give me everything the right ginormous clipboard of all the things you have to get done that day.

And if you don't put that puzzle in just the right order, you're not going to get the job done in time.

And then you're going to have a you're going to go down bad and you potentially everybody else down with you until you will be hated.

And so it was like I didn't want to be like that hated, you know to be the private like I was already at a total disadvantage.

You don't be the Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket like it was put in the extra effort, but that's one of the things I really learned was.

People see that and if you are busting your ass and if you're not slacking and if you're just not totally incompetent people are going to build you up at least if you're in a good place, if if you're not that kind of place you should probably leave but people don't me up over time and by the end of those three months.

No, Heston, I would not become anything close to the best line cook not even not even at the same caliber, but I did have a knack for solving problems that nobody else could solve and that's one Heston was like, you know, I've always wanted to have a kitchen that works on the new ideas.

I've always wanted to have a place that away from the pressures of service where we develop the thing we experiment where we can afford to fail without affecting the customers and with your science background.

Why don't you move to England full-time Chris and build that up and then that was that was my opportunity.

So is like walk through that door, right? This wasn't that hard what types of problems were you able to solve that led him to so there are two things.

So one was our stock we made an unbelievable number of different stock and ask him.

What kind of this no hold barred.

We're going to go for the last .

1% of perfection on everything.

And stocks come from meat in meat is really expensive and we were doing things like roasting down and tired legs of animals to canteen off the juices as they accumulated quite these unbelievable decadent Rich Jew to go with the the bear for the various sauces and now it was at time-consuming and labor-intensive.

But like it was ludicrously expensive like just totally insane like you could take the talk to most Michelin star chefs and maybe like that's crazy talk.

Nobody.

Does that what we did and I remember being like what would that so just just to try to put a 5.

9 when you say absurdly expensive like what we would do something like that look like thousands of pounds a week for a restaurant that really couldn't afford to be doing that because we didn't have enough customers out of him.

If you did have enough customers it still nuts because you don't have that kind of margin do that, but we did like because it was better that we would do it.

And I remember we would serve the pieces of meat for family meal and guess what like the lamb still taste like Lamb and the Beast still tasted like beef and in the veal still tasted like veal and like Mike Emma spring kicks in his like we haven't gotten everything out.

Like is it as nice as it is to have like the lamb stew for for staff me which would make the Irish contingent happy.

Like that's not a good thing for the restaurant and so I was like, you know, I think we can do a better job here by grinding the meet-up to increase the surface area volume and let's use a pressure cooker because increase of temperature we can extract more and so I did a bunch of experiments like in between service and I was creating some of the stocks that has to be like these rival anything we're doing and I'm doing it with a fraction the beat so it's a restaurant we ended up buying a $36,000 pressure brat pack and it was like big a giant scale commercial lot pressure cooker and hiring a chef that just did that full-time for all our stocks and sauces and we paid it back I think.

In the first 6 months in terms of the savings and we shifted all of the production over.

So like that was one thing that was a very process or anything was very transparent to the customers.

But about the same time Heston was starting to spend time with fraud Adria and Albert Adria from El Bowie and they were just starting to do something that would become famous for about a year these caviar these little edible caviar that they are making from melon and the way they were doing it as they were taking a seaweed-based hydrocolloid technically alginate and they were mixing that that hydrocolloid into melon juice in Dripping it into a calcium bath that caused it to set up an electrical folk a VR that tastes like melon.

And so this I think went on the 2004 lb menu in Hesston to seen it and they were very secret like why you take product Axe and you mix it with product Y and this is what you get so has been came back was like, how is that done and I sort of reverse engineered it and figured it out.

Those are the kinds of little things that I started kind of getting a reputation for even though I was like in many other regards like nowhere near the caliber of the other chefs in terms of like raw technical Rock cooking abilities.

And so that kind of gave me my opening you are one of only a few friends that I enjoy asking seemingly innocuous questions of because I get pretty much the same pattern and I see this with you.

I see it with a number of friends like Matt mullenweg another mutual friend and then we have Eric cressey who does trains a lot of pressure baseball players and what not.

If I ask him about deadlifts or any type of Tara might have on the inside of my leg.

So I just wanted the whole thing because it's like a mini Novella, but this is usually how it works is all I'll send you a text and it will be something like hey if I wanted to cool down the water in my bathtub to 50° Fahrenheit for 45 degrees.

I'm looking at this this in this option, what would you do and usually the responses along the lines of let me think about that.

I might think about A or B.

And then I remember went radio silent and then day later.

I got this email ice baths and such as the subject line and Hillary part of it.

So I did a little bit about this and some quick math to confirm my intuition tldr buy a small ice maker heating cooling Waters a pain because the water has the highest specific heat amount of energy required to change the temperature of 1 gram by 1 degrees Celsius of any common substance.

You're about to pull something like 50 gallons of Sue me or cold tap water comes out of 50 degrees Fahrenheit and you would like a bath at 40 degrees Fahrenheit and you need to pull by 4.

44 million joules of heat energy out of adding ice is by far the fastest most efficient way to do the job without resorting to any kind of nonsense direct injection of liquid nitrogen would be fun 29 pounds of I should do the job nicely better yet.

If the ice is cute little milk quickly.

So your bath within 10 minutes or so kind of a similar service area approach that you would use for the to do you can go high-tech and get an emerging Schiller of some kind of the job eventually.

It's going to take awhile.

Then this is this is the part that I like.

I just goes on and on your typical domestic electrical outlet is limited to 15 amp switch works out to about 1800 watts of power drawing anymore in the fuse is going to blow physics being a bitch that it is emergency alerts only about 40% energy efficient the best this means that even a $4,000 1801 laboratory it goes on and on and on.

So have you always had this degree of OCD.

Just in case I like it because you've harnessed it for the four powers of good and I don't know I'm not working on evil.

It's true or not.

Not mutually forces of evil and I'm going to retrieve I have a yak Milk Bone that my dog is chewing and making a lot of noise with Molly.

I'll give you one of these later so I'm going to retrieve that but his this has this been a Great present since you were a little kid or poor when did that start? I think on some level you.

Yeah, I I am terrible at things that I am not interested in if I'm interested in it.

It's one of these things where I will devote almost all might I know completely obsessed about it and I actually don't have a very good off switch which can make me pretty difficult to deal with sometimes and is I think back like in elementary school junior high high school things that I was interested about in like high school is a great example was super into desktop publishing in zeins and like like reading raygun in early early issues of wire to be like I want to do stuff like that.

Like I obsessed about it learned everything about a new who is doing what but like math at the time who gives a rat's ass in like even though it was like super bad for my college admissions process like that didn't motivate me.

So I think I've always had the I like to obsess on stuff where I can just keep going deeper and deeper and and on some level mastering or at least understanding what Mastery is about in that in that area, but it's totally driven by whatever's interesting me at that time.

How did you get converted to being interested in math? Like they was at a particular teacher.

Yeah, I think it was a combination.

So I was briefly at the University of Vermont.

It's and it's not where I finish my degree, but I started there mostly because it was very far from New Mexico.

Where are high school wasn't I wanted to get the hell out and also because their admissions policy was basically do you have up for an out-of-state? Like do you have a pulse? Like can you pay out-of-state tuition? Yeah, it's okay welcome.

I took a whole bunch of classes, but somehow I ended up signing up for calculus one which was like in retrospect like totally insane.

There was no reason to believe that was a good choice at all.

But it was a particularly good.

I was actually grad student teaching it and somehow it made sense.

A lot of it was a lot of its thinking of you know, calculus is often about can be thought of in terms of the math of motion and stuff.

And so I found I had this knack for being able to think things through and visualize stuff very, well it in terms of movement or process or I can manipulate three-dimensional objects really well in my head and that's like I don't know that that actually makes you like well qualified for this but somehow that and my unique Background made it work for me.

And I was I just remember being shocked like I got an A which was like super weird.

I was like, wow, I've no idea how I did that but it was enough that I kind of wanted to keep going and the further I got in it the more interesting it got and the more I discovered there was really interesting creative problems that I could solve with those kind of tools and now it's starting to make sense for me.

It's like it wasn't for its own sake is affected by these are tools that allow me to solve and do these other interesting things.

And so I was like, okay I want to learn this because I want to be able to do those kinds of things and this is like the stuff you need to know to be able to go do that.

What's up books.

If any have you gifted the most other people I've definitely maybe on food and cooking.

I've gifted that a lot there.

I mean my career starts with that book in many ways and you know, there would be there wouldn't be any of this modern cooking movement without Harold the book.

I don't think in the certainly wouldn't be modern Cuisine that that made the big ate a big bowl of my career without that book.

So I've given up a lot because I think it's relevant and I think for a certain type of individual it's this kind of book that every time you open it up.

You see something like I didn't even know that was there that super Cooling and you read something.

Oh, well, that's the world is like way more interesting than I thought.

I think of gifted Michelle brosseau Central Cuisine quite a bit of the Retard to do now because I think it's out of print English and quite expensive the other book.

I found myself gifting a lot lately is a out-of-print book on thermodynamics called the second law and was written by an Oxford physical chemistry professor named PW Adkins and that book is just a phenomenal casual infographic late and read on how the world works from an energy perspective.

And I found that so incredibly useful in trying to understand how to do something how to make something work whether something's even possible.

It's frequently my bullshit detector when somebody's trying to convince me some technology or some idea has Merit.

I very quickly come back to just sketching out the kind of thing I did for that email where it's like, let me just see with knowing nothing about the subject if I can just sketch out the basic ideas of the end.

Of how much energy is going to be involved or consumed or like if I assume Limitless capacities does this make any sense ever and so many things that sound good like just don't pass muster as soon as you start looking at the world that way or like well, that's clearly just a waste of everybody's time and we should just stop and go do this this thing over here which like at least you're not having to invent new physics or violate the laws of physics to go do it how much mathematics backgrounds do you need or physics background? Do you need for that book to be readable dun dun interested and curious minutes are some people's eyes are glazed over but it's been to be a popular side.

Like I did like the hard core math Layton physical chemistry, but I have to go look up the map for some of that stuff.

Now.

I'm very rarely do in math.

It's much fancier than like division.

It's the concepts in just basically saying like Okay, like energies got to be conserved or Efficiency is you like what is the maximum theoretical efficiency this could ever work at so does like the idea of a hundred mile per gallon car even make sense on the face of it.

It's like no that's never going to happen unless we get rid of are so those kind of things you don't actually need that much fancy math, but it's useful just to have the concept of thinking about this is how this weird thing.

We call Energy actually works in what's possible in this world.

And what's not possible read any fiction I do what comes in and goes in phases.

So I think most recently I read Neal Stephenson seveneves and like mostly because I made a very very minor contribution to a sub theme in that book.

I found like I actually enjoyed that a lot but mostly because it was like competence porn.

What is that mean Neil likes to go on these big That's all.

About how some aspect of Technology works and it see if you know any of its usual because like he fell into that hole and Doug pretty deep and came back with all that because he knew all these experts with this understanding will go on for pages and pages and Pages explaining like how you would actually attached nuclear reactor to a comet and you're like, it's basically engineering Port as I go.

This is how you do it's like if I've ever heard of that situation now, I know he did that in cryptonomicon with some of the tunneling passages, right and which I love because I think you and I and lot of our mutual friends are hardwired to get a crackhead from that type of detail like knowing how to do something and get stuff done because I suppose at some of what I liked about cooking and what I like about Engineering in the types of stuff.

I do now, you're like changing the world you're making something happen and it's not very abstract.

Like it's very concrete and It's like my brain somehow that he like that's just really sad is fine.

And so books that tap into that competence porn.

I was looking at my Facebook feed of Alex Honnold.

So he interviewed him for the podcast.

I'm not sure if it will have been published yet when people hear this probably so he's the most famous free solo climber in the world and has many many speed records and there was a pussy put up about Stress and Anxiety and the point he makes is one of things I love about climbing in being the mountains to the mediate return environment.

You make decisions you an impact you reevaluate you make more decisions Etc.

In other words of Deeds are delayed return environment being tied to anxiety.

So it strikes me that on the break human level of be fulfilling to have that type of immediate feedback inability to iterate that you have an engineering or cooking.

I tend to gravitate towards things where it's actually weird like the day today provides very tangible feedback.

The goals can actually take years to accomplish, but I find I don't have the stain powder for products were there isn't a fairly fast the feedback loop running on some level that tells me if I'm even going in a good direction if it's just totally ambiguous or or you just can't know I really struggle with that that's hard.

See you talked about the writing the letter to Hesston and then your Jedi mind trick on the Gent earlier.

You've also works with Nathan myhrvold as we mentioned later directly with Bill Gates.

How do you end up working for these people? And if you had to try to tie the other some kind of pattern is there one will Sophie food definitely ties.

If you got to be quite explicitly I met Nathan because he was a guest at the fat Dokken.

Seattle is home for him and say I was kind of sort of home for me before the fat duck guy.

I ended up going to University of Washington.

That's why did my degrees and it's it was as home is anywhere.

So Nathan was fascinated by cooking.

It was particularly fascinated by the science behind cooking in that was a shared passion.

We struck up a friendship over that so who is MS-13 blue know so many things depending on who you ask but the definition I will give his Nathan was my co-author of modernist cuisine Nathan was there would be no matter cuz he without Nathan he's most famous.

I think for being the first Chief technology officer of Microsoft.

He's more controversial today for being the founder and CEO of intellectual Ventures and invention company decide a giant Patton told the others the I think the truth is somewhere much more in the middle.

And it looks like the Lessons Learned in Den.

You can pick and choose from whether it's Nathan Bill Gates Heston.

Are there any lessons or Expressions that really stuck with you that come to mind and I'll buy you some time just by giving a person example, like I had a professor at Princeton had a huge impact on there were only a few who did at the University despite the abundance of riches that they have butt Edge shower z s c h a u who who taught high tech entrepreneurship one of the first computer science professors ever at Stanford partially because just like that cook didn't show up if I can leave the same thing happened in there like connect.

What is this computer computer science teacher and that went on to take a number of companies public become a congressman be At one point.

I remember I was trying to get into his class is already full and was oversubscribed and I said I'll do anything.

I can have sent the a similar letter but it was a letter I sent him a letter I guess was an email through some basic terminal we had at the time and I said I'll do anything.

I'll clean the erasers and pain in between classes.

Whatever it takes.

I just all sit on the floor don't even need a chair etcetera.

And one point I actually did like clean up afterwards and he said the Migos Tim.

He's like don't get too good at the meaning of stuff.

That's actually pretty profound.

So there are definitely some so I've been really really lucky it's more intentional now than it was then but to have ended up with some profound mentors in my life.

My father was was absolutely my first one I grew up in a family business.

I think that today that gives us like I'm so glad for having like a cat.

Water visibility into that at a young age because now like I need to do that and I was looking to me for that.

So what was the business advertising research and that dinner that also has has proved fortuitous of just having really thought about how advertising actually works.

How brands are built.

What's good advertising? What's bad advertising? How marketing is put together these kind of things that's like in Norma sleep practical when you're running a company because it's a big part of like your job.

Even if you're not doing the work you if you're the CEO you need to have some sense of like what this is all about.

So many other aspects my dad was a mentor but certainly giving me visibility at a very young age and just how he thinks about running.

His business was helpful with Heston.

Were there any specifics that your dad gave you or any particular thing to be showed you that stuck with you? I think there's two things so 1 I remember something he said to me I probably was a freshman or a sophomore in high school.

I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico and I distinctly remember him saying, you know not needing to worry about what I was going to do because the job I was going to do hadn't even been invented yet a job description for what I did.

I made it up and got some somebody agreed.

That was nothing nothing.

Like we're just going to stop like, you know, the interesting jobs are the ones that you make up I think and that's something I certainly hope to instill in.

My son is like don't worry about what your job going to do things that you're interested in and if you do them really, well, you're going to find a way to temper them with with some good business opportunity in that was the other thing you talk.

Was it some point you for as much value as you're trying to create in the world? You need to capture some of the value tube so that you can do more of that and you know, I supposed to day I'm just trying to strive for that.

So he gave me a lot of freedom to are you know, there's absolutely he gave me the ability to take risks that seemed totally nuts.

Like the fact that I gave up.

What do most people look like giving up on nearly nine years of advanced education to go become a cook like the most people like I had gone insane like that made zero sense whatsoever.

Like you're going to throw away.

All your degree is your PhD track to go be a cook.

Like what what the hell is wrong with you and he's like you do it like totally reasonable thing to go.

Do there's never that judgment on the key also have in a typical career path.

Parents met with my dad was in the Peace Corps and my mom was teaching in a Convent School in Grenada.

She was no longer and none but yeah jokes and Sue here, she'd been undone for 7 years and of course like being and not a bad gig so, you know that was formative for him and you know, he came from and I've literally seen the house he was born in which had a dirt floor like he was the alien of the family who had a perfect sat which got him in the uterus in Chicago in a free ride in like, you know, I think he was always striving to make that pay off and Anderson, he never really took the traditional path all the way to he founded his own business doing research for came out of the Admiral and so he started doing research for Fortune 100 brands globally and he founded his business and Albuquerque, New Mexico and made that work and he was only possible because my 1990, you know a fax machine and a million miles a year on American Airlines made such a thing possible, but it worked and it gave us you're all right with that.

My mom working is a nurse paid the bills all the way through the 90s and gave us the opportunity to take a few more risks as as I got into college and Beyond.

How did your mom respond also support a bike my parents? I think my parents had a pretty good sense of who I was and stubborn and I think they knew that saying no.

Yeah, I'm going to do it either way.

So they might as well be supportive of it because like I got to go do this.

I think they kind of thought it would have been a phase.

I don't think they were maybe it is nearly 40.

I had to grow up pretty soon but they they actually were reasonably incursion feel like, you know, you're going to learn a lot.

This will be interesting and I think what was really good in from their perspectives are good.

They couldn't help me in that area.

There wasn't like they could be supportive his parents.

They help pay the credit card bill sometimes when it was getting outlandish and I was totally burning a hole in the ground, but beyond that they had no influence in whether I did well is that if there was there was no net there.

There was no my parents had no influence of that world or couldn't pull any strings.

That was all self.

Which I think they thought was really good for me.

And and I think it was I think it was like incredibly helpful to have those be your own achievements and not well then my parents make this possible for me.

What are some of the lessons that time that you took from more things you learned from Hesston, I mean spend any specific instances few things, but the biggest thing by far was Heston top me what the standard of Excellence really as he always was pushing for the last bit of effort always a saying no, we can move the goalposts we can do better and he kept raising the bar on the team on the recipes on everything.

It was never he wasn't by the time I got there I'd heard in the early days.

You know, there was there was quite a bit of a temper about it.

But by the time I got there he didn't yell.

And AT&T signal disappointment in other ways, but he really pushed you the team everyone else to strive for excellence call the time signal disappointment.

Well, I can I can give you my one canonical example, which was I remember I was on Garmin J.

I was doing sitting out one of these could use some of that.

It's the section code section it in traditional Kitchen products, but I was responsible for sending out several of the first courses that people got so the red cabbage gazpacho the famous Quail jelly with with toast for getting out some of the things around the section.

I would send out the pre desserts and there was a few things on the on the olive cart menu that the fat duck had at the time because I have the deep fryer.

I would have to do the pig's head terrine.

I would do the radish ravioli and and some of these is actually a plus prepare the stocks and a whole bunch of other side was a it was a What's the most technically demanding section, but I grant still say she was Grand Central Station until it was a beast of a job in that regard.

So I remember this would have been 2003 early what I was actually still staging I was before I'd found of the fact that the experimental Kitchen in Indian head screw earn the right to to fuck up a little I sent out a quail jelly that was for Suw