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Founders: #219 Tony Bourdain: The Definitive Biography

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What I learned from reading Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- [28:32] All the energy he'd put into trying to destroy himself, he put that into building himself back up. All that negative energy became something else. He became so serious, and so driven and focused. He worked really hard. It takes a lot of determination to wake up early in the morning and write, and then go to a job in the kitchen, and come home at god knows what hour, and get up the next morning and do it again. He was a fiend. One time, he said about his disciplined writing regimen, "Such was my lust to see my name in print." He threw himself into his work in a manner that I found astonishing. [41:17] He gave me really good advice: "Stay public. You gotta promote, promote, promote, or it all dies. You just gotta be out there all the time." Tony embraced that.[56:17] He proceeded to tell everyone to ignore the network. He said, "Completely ignore everything they're saying about music, about story, about shots. Let me deal with it all. I'm gonna make the show I want to make, across all fronts.” I h

[00:00:00] Tony's unexpected death in June 2018 meant the end of anything new from him. All that he had ever written, drawn, recorded, or filmed in the world was done. A complete body of work. Tony's death also marked the beginning of a years-long process of discovery, in which I interviewed 91 people who had known him, to hear their stories and learn more about him than what he'd already shared in the pages of Kitchen Confidential, his subsequent works of nonfiction, and on television. This book is the result of that process. As his assistant and occasional co-author, I thought I'd already…

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