How Anthony Bourdain Dealt with Fame

When you were doing this, he was just a local celebrity in the New York restaurant scene, right? Had no reservations started yet? Or... This was... Kitchen Confidential? Yeah, so Kitchen Confidential came out in 2000. So he was already on the rise. I think he was a season or two into a cooks tour, which was the very first iteration of Tony on television. But there was no... He always would say, I've got my 15 minutes. I have no expectation that this is gonna last forever. I'm gonna do as much as I can while I can. But I think he was always waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under him, as far as being a celebrity, whatever that is. Yeah, he was. It was really interesting. It's hard for people to realize that other people appreciate them, I think. People that are genuinely humble... He was a genuinely humble person. He really didn't buy into his own bullshit at all. So when you would talk to him about it, he was like, this could fuck a man terribly at any moment. Yeah, I remember being with him in the green room. He did a book tour for the cookbook Appetites that we wrote together in 2016. And he did a series of lectures, basically like a one hour stand up routine in these theaters and then book signing. So we were at the last one at BAM in Brooklyn, in the green room. And he was just like, oh God, I fucking hate this. I feel like such a... What was the word? He was such a fraud. Yeah. And I was like, what are you talking about? You just had like 13 sold out shows. The book is doing amazing. You're literally Tony Bourdain. He was like, yeah, it's all bullshit. I'm embarrassed that people have paid money to come and see me talk. It was really illustrative to me to hear him talk like that, to realize he doesn't think he's as great as we know he is. That's a common thing amongst, at least my people, amongst comedians. It's in many successful people, it's called imposter syndrome. And it exists because you have a certain sort of a set perception of who you were just going through life sort of anonymously. And then it radically changes and it doesn't feel real. And so to other people who have just discovered you, they love your show, they love your writing, they love your take on the world as you travel and eat everywhere. You think like, I'm the same fucking idiot that I was. He's probably thinking he's the same guy he was in 95. And now here all these people love him. It doesn't make any sense. And just feel like this is going to fall apart. This is fake. Yeah. And that's also why he was so interesting is because the people that are legitimately full themselves and really think everything they're doing is great are gross. They're gross. They come off gross. When you see someone write like, I'm the shit, you're like, what? That is so gross. And it's such the opposite of what anybody ever wants to hear. And maybe you could say it in jest and people think it's funny. But for the most part, the people that are really enamored with themselves and their work are just not nearly as interesting as the people that are tortured by it. It's such a conundrum, right? It's like a guy like Tony, who is such an interesting, fascinating person just to talk to, just to have a conversation with because he had such a clear perspective on things, the way he looked at things. He was very aesthetic. He enjoyed certain style of communication and of hanging out. There was an art to just conversation with the guy. So it makes sense that he hated himself. In the most fucked up way possible, it makes sense. Yeah. I think too, there was this disconnect between the guy that he was before he got famous and the guy after. And I think he always thought about how the guy, the old guy probably would have made fun of the new guy. He and all his buddies who were cooks stuck in the kitchen would hate this guy with the expensive shoes and the nice apartment and flying first class. Yeah, that's what happens. You want to be punk rock and then all of a sudden you have a million dollars in the bank. You're like, hey. Yeah, yeah. Who am I? I think I'm going to eat at a nice place tonight. I think I'm going to buy a watch. You really can feel like a fraud. It's fascinating because so many people are really haunted in a lot of ways by the past. There's this rebellious, rigid attitude that you develop when you're struggling, when you're coming up. It becomes the structure of where your attitude comes from. And then when that structure is removed by success in Tony's case, and then you're left with, okay, I'm not even ... In his eyes, he had done all these hours of being in the kitchen, the real work, those long days and long nights. There was something noble about that. And then all of a sudden he's just going to visit these guys and he's not in the game anymore and he's going to visit these incredible cooks and seeing these amazing dishes and these insane restaurants. I think part of that he felt like a little bit of a fraud because of that. Yeah, yeah. He was always very careful to say, I was not a great chef. I think it's very ... People kind of just ... In the same way that people thought that the whole ... With the AI thing that it was all of the movie versus 45 Seconds, there's just a glossing over kind of sloppiness of recollection. Because he was a chef, everyone would say, oh, he was a great chef or a celebrity chef or a famous chef. He was always really careful to say, I wasn't. I was good at leading a kitchen. I was good at getting food out on time, but I was not in any way a world famous creative chef. I was a leader of men. There was, I think, a lot of insecurity, but just a recognition that he wasn't the kind of chef like Eric Ripert, his good friend or any of these guys that he really admired. He wanted everyone to know that he knew that too. Yeah, it's just the genuine humility about him. Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.