Alton Brown - Think Again Podcast - Easy-Bake Oven/Hard Knock Life

Hey there! I'm Jason Gots and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast. Since 2008, Big Think has been bringing you big ideas in little concentrated doses from some of the most creative thinkers around. On Think Again, we step outside of our comfort zone, surprising our guests—and me, your host—with unexpected clips from Big Think's archives: ideas that we didn't necessarily come here prepared to discuss.

Today, I'm very, very happy to be joined by actor, writer, and director Alton Brown. Let me say that again: I'm not an actor, as far as I know.

“Oh well, they call you that on IMDb!”

“And they do. They probably shouldn't.”

“Well, I mean, you did voice work on The Simpsons, didn’t you?”

“Voice on The Simpsons? I’ve done voice work on Disney projects. That's where I'm going today, actually.”

“You're an actor!”

“I’m a cook. I’m just a cook.”

Alright, so cook, writer, and director Alton Brown—a living legend in food TV! You may not be aware that he was the cinematographer for the video for R.E.M.’s ‘The One I Love’ when he was a film student. He was the creator and host of the show Good Eats, which ran for 14 seasons over 14 years—14! I don’t—we don’t even know how many seasons it was—14 countless seasons and 14 long, amazing years on Food Network. He has a 9 out of 10 rating on IMDb, which is basically unheard of. Casablanca, by contrast, is 8.6.

He’s also known as the host of Iron Chef America, Cutthroat Kitchen, and Feasting on Asphalt. He’s the author of many books, and his latest book is Everyday Cook, one word, in which he shares his favorite personal recipes, including the amazing-looking breakfast carbonara, which I will be making forthwith. It makes pasta for breakfast not only okay, but it seems to me mandatory.

Welcome to Think Again, Alton!

“Thank you very much! After that very long—”

“No, that was great! A longer introduction means you’re getting something done, I guess.”

“So okay, I have a bunch of questions for you. Let’s start with your book, Everyday Cook. The tagline is ‘this time it’s personal’ because these are recipes you’ve created?”

“Yes, yeah! And I wondered whether there are any interesting or fun or quirky or strange stories behind any specific recipe. They all look amazing! I want to make that bourbon bread pudding ASAP.”

“The carbonara—interesting stories, you know. I think that whenever you’re trying to paint a self-portrait, you have to question some of the things that you do. I think that, you know, you take your food—your kind of everyday food—and try to translate it into a book-worthy recipe. It’s always an illuminating activity. I didn’t realize how much I cooked things with alcohol. I have to take a real close look at myself. I didn’t realize, wow, I really am drinking a great deal. And how really bad I am at certain things.”

“Such as?”

“Well, oddly enough, you know the most frustrating recipe in this book? It was something that I was like, well I do this every day so it’s going to be easy to write down and get right. And we started testing it—it was actually working out the procedure for cold brew coffee—because you realize that people’s tastes become far more challenging. You know, a few years ago you’d say, ‘Oh here’s cold brew,’ and people would say, ‘Oh okay.’ Now you say, ‘Well here’s cold brew,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh well, you know, the cold brew...’ blah blah blah. And this was all of a sudden so much more knowledgeable, and their tastes are so much more developed, and they’re picky about things like that. So I realized that, oh my God, I haven’t tested this enough. It’s not working 100% of the time. And gosh darn it, you know, I really need to make sure that these notes are coming out of this. We—I had to do it over and over and over and over for something that I thought was going to be a throwaway, punk shot, easily done.”

“That’s really interesting.”

“Yeah, I mean I think when I think about kind of the history of food entertainment, these trends come up. You suddenly—everyone—salt is the thing or whatever is the thing. But I guess also there is this thing of people getting more and more sophisticated.”

“Yes, and then, so then what? As consumers—”

“As consumers, and—and that—go ahead.”

“No, no, no, please.”

“No, go ahead.”

“It’s a big deal because you know people now understand, oh gee, that’s Spanish saffron in there, isn’t it? And you’re like, oh my gosh, we are so good at grocery shopping. We are so knowledgeable as eaters, even people that can’t cook, which is interesting. It’s like someone can’t scramble eggs but can, you know, make critical analysis of caramel. You know? And so it’s an interesting time to be writing about food and certainly developing recipes because expectations are high. And so with a book like this, it’s not that I’m worried that people won’t have success with the recipes; it’s that they’ll think less of me because of how I eat. That’s the thing. It’s like this for the first time—I’m writing a book that’s actually food that I eat. I’m not trying to prove any points. I’m not writing for science. This is just my food, and I’m afraid people are going to look at it and say, ‘Well gee, you’re a kind of, you’re a simplon, aren’t you? That’s actually not—that you’re not as interesting as we thought you were. Where’s the molecular? Where’s the molecular?’”

“There’s no freaking molecular! I mean, in as much as that, yeah, I’m not making spherification and, you know, flavored smoke and stuff like that. This is just food, you know?”

“Right, right, right. But although I have to say, like you know, that’s refreshing as well. And probably everyone is always going to be interested in food in one form or another. You can’t become endlessly increasingly sophisticated. There comes a point with any art or science—well, I don’t know about science—but with any art at least where I think there has to be a kind of backlash towards simplicity sometimes, and people saying, you know, ‘What, how do we make a good hamburger?’”

“You know, I honestly just want—well, there’s a level to where you can only fuss with something so much to where you just say, ‘Damn dude, it’s just a hamburger!’ Okay? I mean, lighten up! And you know there’s a hamburger in my book, and the only reason I’m worried about it is that when I make hamburgers for myself, I make them in a way that I never would have admitted that I make them. I actually deep fry the things, and if you do it right, it makes a delightful burger that’s not greasy. But I would have been afraid to share that even a few years ago. You know, so many were horrified when they learned that about deep-fried turkeys, but now it seems to be like people are purchasing $700 turkey deep fryers. Why they’re doing that? I have absolutely no idea, because you can do that at a hardware store for about 50 bucks. But if they want that, they can.”

“I mean, if there’s a new gadget to geek out on, people will.”

“A couple other things. So you have a stage show, Alton Brown Live. It’s coming over Science?”

“Yeah, the Eer Science. It’s my second road show. The big difference with this one is that we’re playing Broadway in November, which is a little bit—just a wee bit terrifying.”

“Yeah, you’re going to be at the Barrymore, right?”

“The Barrymore! Only eight performances, but it’s still Broadway. You know, you can play a show—we’ve already toured this particular show for seven weeks in the spring. We’re changing it up a little bit for Thanksgiving. But, you know, you can play a lot of houses, and you’ll still be terrified by Broadway, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, so it’s intimidating. It’s like Hamilton’s right over there, you know?”

“Well, I can throw a rock and hit that. At least Lin-Manuel's not there anymore.”

“Yeah, because that would be way too intimidating. Way too intimidating!”

“Yeah, so, but you’ve got puppets and—”

“And puppets!”

“Fire!”

“I assume there’s fire?”

“No, there’s not fire. You know why? You can’t. Theater people don’t like fire. Um, matter of fact, coming up with a big culinary variety show that’s fireless has been the constant issue, because this is our second full show. Because heat is a big deal, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“So it’s like when we did our first show, The Edible Inevitable Tour, we built a gigantic Easy-Bake Oven out of lights—8 feet tall, 12 feet long. It generated 1,016,000 lumens of light and would cook a large pizza in about four minutes. And it was very visual and we could do it because it was lights, no fire. The way that I do my shows is the first act has always got a giant demo that’s cold, and the other one is always heat.”

“Yeah, interesting! That’s all I’ll say. Asterisk there. Like—it is the great regret of my childhood that I never had an Easy-Bake Oven, because they were marketed all girly, and so my parents wouldn’t buy me one.”

“There is a song—there’s a song on my CD coming up called ‘Easy Bake,’ and it’s a very angry punk song about how I was not allowed to have one and how when I asked Santa for one, he had told me they were for girls. And there’s a whole section about that, and then I finally saved enough money to get my own damn Easy-Bake Oven. I’ve been getting back ever since! They’re still making them!”

“They do? They’re grotesquely underpowered now, and they’re very difficult to hack.”

“Are they still pink?”

“Because they were—”

“They’re purple now!”

“Purple?”

“Because, yeah! Prince! Prince might have had one!”

“Yeah, right on! Awesome! Well, I'm so glad that you've made a punk song.”

“I did! There is a punk song about—it’s kind of a folk punk song, but I don’t even know if that’s a thing.”

“I guess it is punk, but acoustic, I guess it is now. And actually, the last thing I want to say on the stage show front is that I’ve had an idea for many years that maybe now we have an opportunity—maybe this will actually take flight as a result of this conversation—Benny Hana, the musical!”

“Absolutely!”

“People, I will back that! I will back that! I will back Benny Hana, the musical, right now! Let me get my checkbook; I’m in!”

“But you’d probably need fire to make it cool.”

“See, that’s the problem—fire and theaters don’t mix and getting insurance. My first show, I had one part of the show where I lit a Zippo lighter, okay? And there were several cities, especially in California, where if I lit a Zippo lighter, I had to have three firemen on staff on stage. Kind of like, really? For a Zippo lighter? But apparently in the past, some theaters have burned down with a lot of people inside.”

“That’s why we have video!”

“We do. Big fire things on video! Still, there must be some way to make it work for Benny Hana, the musical.”

“I think there is! It’s just a matter of—we’ve got to fake the fire—sort of flapping silk or something! Theater craft!”

“Alright, well, Alton, this brings us to the second part of the show in which we discuss surprise concepts. Now, if they surprise you and they surprise me, where did they come from?”

“Well, so here’s the deal. Yeah, so Big Think does video. We have like 10,000 little clips of interviews dating back to 2008 with just about everyone—physicists, whatever, you know? They’re chosen by the producers and they could be on three different subjects, or they might have decided to make your life too easy, and it’s all David Chang or something. But let’s see! Let’s see what we get!”

“Go for it!”

“Alright, the first one is Drew Ramsey, who is a nutritional psychiatrist, on diet and depression.”

“So I’m depressed whenever I go on a diet. I can confirm this.”

“Okay, case closed! There is a relationship between dieting and depression. Case closed. Conversation over!”

“For about 10 years, we’ve had very strong correlational data showing that, for example, when you eat poorly, your risk of depression and illness like depression just goes up 70%-80%. And when you eat a more traditional diet like a Mediterranean diet or Japanese diet, your risk of an illness like depression can go down by as much as 50%. So that’s now led to the first clinical trial that is just being reported, showing that a Mediterranean diet, augmented with some red meat, actually can treat clinical depression, major depression disorder. And it’s a very exciting moment for nutritional psychiatry. It’s a time when we have more science that tells us food should really be part of the conversation when it comes to our mental health. We think about a lot of illnesses when we eat—heart disease, cancer, diabetes—and it’s always struck me that really the illness you should be worried about, or the organ you should be worried about when you’re eating, is your brain, because that is by far your biggest asset. It consumes more of your energy and your food than any other organ you have. And so focusing on the nutrients your brain needs guides you to a slightly different set of foods than if you focus on just things like calories or saturated fat or preventing something like cancer. And so it’s an exciting moment as the data begins to catch up with common sense.”

“Well, first off, there’s absolutely no way to deny the fact that what we put into our mouths affects our mental health. That is absolute! There’s nothing he said that is surprising. Nothing in that message is surprising. And I believe that on a few levels. I believe it on a chemical level, right? The quality and amount of specific nutrients. Let’s face it, we evolved on this planet because we knew what to pick up and eat and what to put down. You know? And if you ate the wrong stuff, you died. It’s part of evolution! We can only really be what we eat on a strictly chemical level.”

“Got it! Absolutely understand that. However, I would also argue that the experiential part of how we absorb food matters as well. I would hazard a guess—I do not have data to support this, but I would imagine that if we took the same diet that was very, shall we say, mental health balanced for the anti-depression diet or whatever, and you and I both did that diet, and you ate alone every day in an airport terminal, and I ate with a great big Jewish family, that our mental health—from that—we would extract very different outcomes, even though we had the same positive nutrients. Because the actual act of how we eat and where we eat and the environment we eat in and the time that we eat in, what we’re listening to, talking to—all of that also affects mental health.”

“So it’s great to be able to look at this at a nutritive level, but we have to see that that is part of a much larger cultural issue.”

“Do you find personally that in your busy entertainment life, are you happy with how and where you eat?”

“No, no! Which is why I’m currently depressed. No, it’s true! Depression is not alien to me. I was treated for it once when I was in culinary school. Okay? Number one, when I get fat, I get depressed because I look dumpy and can’t fit in my clothes. Two, I do believe that simply the kinds of food you eat can lead you into depression, but I also eat alone too often. I eat on the go too often, and I eat right now currently too much food that’s prepared for me by people I do not know, as opposed to by someone who loves me—which is a short list—or myself. So I think that the preparation of food by your own hands or in a family situation—that’s a factor. Where you eat it, how you eat it—that’s a factor. So yeah, right now, I’m not in a great place because of the work that I do, and the way that I travel, and my own lack of discipline and adoration for bourbon.”

“Yeah, yeah, alcohol! Alcohol should be very high up on the list of foods that may cause depression, Al!”

“Well, you know what? For me, it’s not that the alcohol causes depression; it’s that when I drink, I tend to eat badly. Because, you know, the first thing that goes when—fat and the salts—the first thing that goes. You know, I’m a pilot. One of the first things that they teach you when they’re talking about alcohol and flying is, you know, the first thing that goes is your judgment. The first thing that goes is your judgment! Ordinarily, I wouldn’t eat this bag of potato chips, but I’ve had two drinks, so, by God, I’m going to eat the bag of potato chips! Why? Because my judgment’s gone! But you know, I think there’s also a physiological thing about that, which I don’t actually understand. But, you know, the reason why brunches tend to be sort of fatty and salty? People are hungover! They, you know, they don’t necessarily—like that lack of judgment from the night before isn’t necessarily still there; it’s more like you crave those things for some reason.”

“Well, I think there’s a physical thing going on there as well, because, you know, when your body is trying to get off of a hangover, which is essentially having been poisoned, certain things really work well! Right? Nothing can get me over a hangover quicker than a good, greasy order of French fries! Because the grease stabilizes—you know—and changes what the liver is doing and kind of shifts the attention in the body.”

“But it’s better—”

“So it’s sort of like if you’ve been horribly injured in one leg—”

“Biting your arm?”

“Biting your arm.”

“Yeah, or if you’ve been snake-bit over here, badly cut.”

“Actually, it’s exactly the opposite of that, but it sounds good!”

“It does sound good, yeah!”

“Okay, well shall we see what the next surprise video is on that note?”

“Oh, this one is Ethan Hawk, the actor, talking about success by small achievable goals.”

“I have thrived on one simple idea, which is placing achievable goals in front of you. I never would give myself a goal like writing a novel. I do well by saying, I’m going to try and write every day for ten days. This is when I, you know, remember when I was first starting to teach myself to write? I would say, I’m going to go away for ten days. I'll go on a ten-day retreat, and I’ll write every day for ten days with the goal of one short story. I’m going to come back with one short story I can hand to my friends, and usually those simple actions give you confidence. I didn’t decide that I wanted to direct films. I told myself that I was going to direct a short film, something that I could afford. I took the money I made from Dead Poets Society, and I made a short film. I’ve got a graphic novel coming out that’s kind of weird, you know, for an actor to do, and I made a documentary last year. I wrote a children’s book. To a lot of people, that strikes them as weird, or they can accuse me of being a dilettante or something like that, right? But I believe in cultivating the attitude of a student at all times. You know, if all I did was act since I was 13, I could do that. But it doesn’t help me become a better actor. But you have to make it, you know, because failing is depressing, and it makes you lose steam. And whereas if you say, like, I don’t have to direct a movie by next year or anything like that, but I will have a first draft or I’ll die. And, okay, and invariably, often, you can get done sooner than that.”

“He said two things, two different things.”

“Yeah, yeah. One, he talked about work outside of your comfort zone, right? I could not agree more. You only define yourself by looking out on the dark edges of the map. You know, I just came out of recording a CD with music that I’d written with me actually having to sing and play the instruments, and why is that funny? Doesn’t matter, I’m kidding. Did that take me out of my comfort zone? Yeah, it took me out of my comfort zone. Did when I designed a stage show that required me to play an electric guitar, which by the way I did not know how to play when I started? But I knew that if I was going to do a variety show, there had to be music, so I had to learn to do these things, and I had to put myself outside the comfort zone and risk ridicule and risk failure. So that’s kind of opposed to what his initial thesis is, which is set up small achievable goals. Small achievable goals are boring and typically—was it Stephen? What’s his name—Burnham? The guy that was the architect that built the—”

“The World’s Fair in Chicago?”

“Oh, I’m not sure! He’s very well known for saying, ‘Make no small plans.’ He said, ‘Make no small plans.’ And so I believe that you know if you set yourself a bunch of little bitty achievable goals, what you will have when you die is a very small achievable life.”

“Okay, can I interject? I think you’re—I think that’s generally right, but I think with very large goals, maybe breaking them down into smaller achievable goals.”

“Well, don’t set yourself up, you know! Don’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m going to, by this time next year, I will have made blah blah blah.’ You’ve got to know—you know, Dirty Harry said, ‘A man’s got to know his limitations.’ You’ve got to know your limitations; you’ve got to know what is reasonable. But if you make it comfortable, like, ‘Okay, I’m going to go on a retreat for ten days and write a short story for my friends,’ what the—really? Really? That’s what you’re going to do with ten days?”

“No, you go to on a retreat for ten days and write something for yourself! I’m sorry!”

“There’s a balance between am I going to be safe. You know? It’s that balance of risk! And if you’re too risk averse, you never get anything done. Anytime that I’ve achieved anything that made me respect myself at all, there was a much higher probability of failure than success. You find yourself in that nook, in that shadowy land between what I know I can do, what I’m pretty sure I can do, and what I have no freaking idea what I can do! And if all of my goals are set for the things I don’t know, then odds are I’m just going to have a life of disappointment and failure. If I do everything within that reel of I can do this, this is an achievable goal, then I will never have known what would have happened if I stretched. So he’s right, and he’s wrong! I think you’ve got that—a successful—I mean, to call it successful, but a life of interesting work: you have to know when to set up achievable goals and when to reach way outside the comfort zone. And it’s finding that balance that’s the real art of a creative life—to know—to find and define that dark gray area between those two things and find out how to live in that area!”

“Yeah, I was going to ask you, like don’t you think it also comes down a little bit to your own knowing your own personal psychology and kind of what is the line for you between taking a risk that’s going to advance you creatively and trauma that’s going to make you shut down for the rest of your life? I mean, I’m not saying that you should always be cautious, but I feel like people grow at different rates and in different ways.”

“Sure they do! And you can have yourself a really nice, successful, profitable career wisely playing it safe by figuring out exactly where the borders of your safety net are and never going past them. There are a lot of people that do that, and you know what? If they’re happy with that—fantastic! No, I’m serious! I’m not being sarcastic! If that—but then there are people that want to see, you know, their personal maps have the little drawing with the thing that says, ‘Beyond here be dragons.’ Right? And there are those of us that want to see the dragons.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe tame a dragon. Maybe get our asses kicked by a dragon. That’s the spark, man! That’s the stuff that makes life! Like, I don’t know if I can do this! I don’t know! I know that I won’t quit! I know that I won’t give up until I really need to! One of my few personal attributes that is useful to me is I am a fantastically good self-editor. I have never done anything that sucked that I didn’t know sucked first. And I know when I can look at my own ideas and say, ‘Oh my God, that is so bad!’ And I’ll come right up next to it. I will play chicken with that. I will get right up close! But I’ll always know when to veer off. And hopefully that keeps me from becoming ridiculous!”

“That’s hard!”

“Yeah! That’s actually—I may be completely wrong about this, by the way, which, you know, only I don’t—I don’t know when we’ll know! And maybe I won’t. I’ve done things that have embarrassed me later where I’m like a ‘Gee, I really wish I could have not done that.’ But at the time I was doing it, I did it better than I thought I could, or maybe better than someone else might have done it! Being your own editor is tough! Like—it’s hard to not fall in love with things because we want to be liked! We want people to say, ‘You’re brilliant!’ But you know what? Knowing how to do that, knowing how to look at your own work, your own ideas, and be the first one to cut something—some people say that there’s a certain amount of self-loathing that comes with being an effective artist—and I actually believe that! I assume in any given situation that I’ the weak link, and I like to surround myself with people that will ensure that I’m the weak link!”

“Right?”

“Working with better people—it is a good—but if—yeah, if you’ve got that whole thing about confidence, I don’t know. Confidence is a slippery fish! And I think that it has to be measured out! It’s very—it’s like heroin! You can get addicted to it! Well, it’s not like heroin because heroin I guess doesn’t actually have any good attributes! But confidence! Confidence is a real dangerous thing! And I don’t know that it’s always good! I know that people respond to it; we’re attracted to people who are confident! But I think the deep down knowing where your dark recesses of unknown is really, really valuable!”

“Yeah! Does that make any sense?”

“No, it makes a lot of sense! I mean it’s possible—I think of someone like W.C. Fields or something who, who knows, maybe he was an incredible self-critic as well, but these giant, outsized, hyper-confidence-seeming people who also achieve great things. And maybe they just absorb failures. And that makes me think of something else. If that clip that you just showed me, Ethan Hawk, yeah? If Orson Welles had seen that, would we have Citizen Kane? Do you think that Michelangelo knew that he had the Sistine Chapel nailed before he went in there? I don’t think that he did, you know! Um, in jazz, people love to tell the story about Charlie Parker and the humiliations that he suffered early in his career, but being—and then fought through that adversity to become probably the best jazz saxophone soloist that human kind has ever known!”

“Right?”

“The value of failure! The value of—okay! Orson Welles may not have failed; he actually knocked it out of the park when he made Citizen Kane! But somebody like Charlie Parker had to fail miserably before being able to bounce back to do something great, right?”

“So if we all live with this thing of not failing, of making sure you don’t fail because, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s depressing,’ well, we don’t get anything great out of that!”

“I mean, I also have to kind of take that with a grain of salt because he’s Ethan Hawk! He’s done a lot of very cool and risky things over the years, and how many of them would you categorize as great? That’s a good point! I’m not saying he didn’t, but I just asked you to name one and you couldn’t!”

“Well, Dead Poets Society! He was very good in it! He’s been a very good actor in many roles!”

“All I did, all I’m saying is that I just asked you name one that was great, and it was five seconds of silence! Uhh, I’m not saying he isn’t great. I’m saying that he’s living a life that allows him to do a lot of different things!”

“I’m like him in that! I—I like—we call that a renaissance man a lot of times when somebody just doesn’t want to settle on one thing! Could he have become the greatest actor of his generation? Maybe! But he’s spent a lot of time doing other things to find out who he is! I admire that greatly!”

“The risk aversion and let’s just say that all those comfortable goals would not work for me because you know what I would do? I would set gobs of comfortable goals that would allow me to simply be comfortable and confident and I would be boring as—and I wouldn’t want to even look at me in the mirror!”

“Yeah, it can become an excuse or a way of self-protection, but it hasn’t for him! It’s worked for him!”

“Not entirely!”

“No! I mean, he’s done a million different things! He’s done a million different things and and he’s been critically acclaimed for a lot of those things! I think it’s a scale, and we all fall in a slightly different place in the scale!”

“Going back to Orson Welles briefly! Like, he did, in fact, fail quite a bit! I mean he—he had some monumental—”

“He failed huge, not until after Citizen Kane!”

“Right! But studios pursuing him for lost hundreds of thousands—”

“Oh my gosh! I—he is one of my favorite characters in history because I—he’s one of the few people that is genuinely Shakespearean in his life. The fact that he, through his theater work during the—, you know the War Project Administration, the Mercury Theater and then moving into Citizen Kane! Dude, did a black Macbeth like in 19—”

“The fact that he made the set in Haiti!”

“They premiered in Harlem! Just—I’m a huge fan of that period and what he did with the Mercury Theater and all of those people! And that, you know, that gave him the confidence to go blundering directly into Orson Wells into Citizen Kane where he admitted, ‘I just didn’t know I was breaking rules!’ I did not know! And of course, he had a fantastic Greg Toland! Probably quite possibly the greatest cinematographer who ever lived made a big difference in that! So he surrounded himself with good people! But then he failed miserably!”

“Yeah, failed! Failed a lot!”

“I wish Werner Herzog had been making documentaries when Orson Welles was alive and could have done—could you imagine?”

“Could you imagine Herzog making a documentary about—not about Citizen Kane but about The Magnificent Ambersons? That would have been a lot more interesting!”

“You know, it’s funny talking about filmmakers and failures. One of my favorite films is Apocalypse Now.”

“Oh yeah?”

“And I don’t love Apocalypse Now so much because I love Apocalypse Now, although it has moments of greatness. I love Apocalypse Now because Francis Ford Coppola almost lost his freaking mind! And there’s that wonderful scene in the documentary that his wife, what, Eleanor Coppola made where he’s saying, ‘I may kill myself. I’ve got no act! I’ve got no page!’ He is out there with all this money in the jungle going insane—which of course, he—that great speech at Cannes when he talked about this movie wasn’t about Vietnam; this movie was Vietnam! We went into the jungle with too much money and lost our minds! And it’s that trip, you know? It’s that journey! It’s like, what balls! And he pulled it off! Somehow! Some would say that he didn’t! Some would say that he did! I think it’s a great film! I think it’s great on many levels! And it’s infinitely more interesting to me than The Godfather!”

“Right. Because it’s obvious when you look closely enough that people really did almost go mad making this!”

“Yeah, certainly, Martin Sheen went mad! Had a heart attack, punched a mirror! And so, you know, when Coppola was making Apocalypse Now, did he set himself small achievable goals clearly? Not clearly—not the dude built, you know, massive villages that got blown away by typhoons! And I think that what that makes him is a hero! And I like heroes! No one ever became a hero answering to small achievable goals!”

“Fair enough! That makes sense!”

“The real difference in a hero is that a hero sets goals probably that are insane but achieves enough of them, you know?”

“Achieves enough of them to then fail beautifully!”

“Yeah! You know, Francis Ford would not get to make Apocalypse Now had he not made Godfather I and Godfather II! Right? Massive Academy Awards—amazing work—not as exciting to me, because he wasn’t on the edge! He had the confidence; he made those films. He was young, he was brash, but he did it, surrounded himself with great people. Gordon Willis, Jr., another one of the greatest cinematographers ever; Pacino was so at the top! Everybody was at the top of their game! But is that heroic? No! Apocalypse Now is heroic! And I think that there’s something in human evolution ever since, you know, Greek tragedy. We need heroes, because we constantly need to be reminded that the uncomfortable is achievable! And we need that. And that actually is what is the opposite of depressing, is seeing that somebody can throw themselves into the abyss and come out with something! You know, and sometimes we fail, and sometimes we make it! But you know, it’s the great doing of it! And so I think that the small comfortable goals could get you through on a day-to-day basis, but as a lifetime philosophy? Nah!”

“Alright, we went on way too long about—”

“No, we went deep with that one! That was awesome! Let’s see where the last one takes us!”

“Um, let’s see what we have next. Oh, this is cool! This will be interesting. This is Alice Gnik. She was on the podcast; she’s a developmental psychologist from Berkeley. It’s on parenting and what kids need most!”

“Are you a parent?”

“I am indeed!”

“How many?”

“I have one! I have a daughter who’s getting ready to turn 17!”

“Wow!”

“I have one boy—he’s eight!”

“Great age! 17! Unimaginable!”

“Yes, and her mom—the distance from here to there!”

“Yeah!”

“Yeah, we live very close to each other! And we’re very close! Her mom and I—divorced last year, so that’s been a bit of an adjustment! But I’m very, very into my kid! And she’s almost too smart to talk to me!”

“Is she in college?”

“On her way to college! She’s on her way! She’s only a junior in high school! She voluntarily decided to take the SAT last year and missed two questions! And it pissed her off! All but two, and it didn’t count because she was only in the tenth grade! That’s what I’m stuck with! Formidable! And she’s also, um, like six feet tall and blonde and beautiful! So it’s like the world is her oyster, it would seem, which is—I hate her! Just—I love her, but I hate her a little bit too! She’s the kind of girl that wouldn’t talk to me when I was in high school!”

“Alright, so parenting isn’t a job; it’s a relationship, is the title of this. Allison Gnik: One of the problems that we always have is the kind of culture in which, say, children are involved. It’s hard to replicate in our current culture! So I always say, sort of ideally, what you’d have is a six to one ratio where you’d have six grown-ups taking care of each child. And maybe a better way of putting it is that you’d have a community of parents; you’d have a community of caregivers. The children are there as part of that community; it’s not as if anybody is sitting there and doing a bunch of special things that are just directed at the child. So the vision that we have from school, there’s someone who’s got this special responsibility of shaping the education of the child; the vision that is often imported into being a parent, so there’s some special set of things you should do—some, you know, flashcards or video or something other than what you would normally do—that’s the thing that you are supposed to do to educate the child. And what the data, the research shows, is that children are learning from just observing and participating in the everyday things that people are doing in an incredibly subtle and powerful way. I mean, the irony is that the unconscious things that you do when you’re interacting with children are much more likely to shape and affect the way they think than any of the things you actually consciously decide to do. And I think we have some lovely models for the way that—for example, you know, my personal favorite is cooking! So my grandchildren come in and cook with me now! The question is, what do we do now to try to—when that’s no longer true; we’re no longer growing up in a village! What can we do now to kind of recreate that situation?”

“I’m so surprised when I look at the world that my daughter Zoe has grown up in or been raised in compared to the way that I was raised. It concerns me greatly. I was not raised perfectly. My father died when I was ten; I don’t have a great relationship with my mother, and I’m a loner; I’m almost incapable of healthy long-term relationships. So we’re doomed!”

“Were you an only child?”

“I was! Until my mom started remarrying, and then I had multiple groups of step-siblings! But the important thing about my upbringing was that although I was born in Los Angeles, my parents very early moved back to North Georgia where they were from! When I was only seven. And so my summers, you know, there was a lot—this was back in the days of, ‘Here’s a sandwich, here’s your bicycle, see you at dinner time!’ Right? And we vanished into the world! And out in that world, we learned certain things; we learned that things would hurt you, and there was a lot of blood, and there was a lot of bandages, and there were broken bones! But you learned to negotiate a physical world in a way that made us self-reliant! Right? We’re not managed! We were not strapped into five-point harnesses! We weren’t even buckled into the back seat! We rode around in the back of pickup trucks! We rode on motorcycles when we were nine! It’s a wonder that any of us survived! But it turned me into a person that I am far more, sorry self-reliant! Um, I know how to get myself around! Um, I can be dropped probably just about any place on planet earth and not dissolve into a puddle of goo! My daughter, on the other hand, who is brilliant, still can’t really find her way around. She drives now, but she doesn’t have an interior map because she was always buckled into a back seat and strapped in with a DVD player! She didn’t observe, right? She got what we gave her, what we attempted to teach her, and some of those lessons took really really well! My, her mom and I realized when Zoe was three that she had actually taught herself how to read, but she wasn’t letting us know because she was afraid we’d stop reading to her! She was already reading faster than I could by the time she was six! She had kind of taken over that way! But she was raised in such a protective way that the only thing—there was no observation, really! Because every activity was planned! Nothing just happened—this village concept, right?”

“Which is so important, especially when you talk about cooking, and food preparation is huge!”

“But parents won’t teach their kids or cook around their kids because they’re afraid their children will be hurt! And make it get burned! Yeah, I’m going to get burned! I’m going to get cut! You when I first started teaching my daughter, who is not a big cook, um, how to cut, I put down a box of Band-Aids, and I said, ‘There’s my way and this way!’ And it made a real impact! Because visually she knew what a Band-Aid box was! She knew what that was going to do! But it’s funny because I didn’t just have her around when I was cooking, and because cooking for me was always work! It was always R&D! It was always a job! You know what? She didn’t absorb much of it, and she’s not very interested in it!”

“She’s not? Yeah, I don’t cook with my kid either, and I don’t know why that happened either! I love to cook! I think I got afraid he was going to cut himself! Yeah, so somewhere along the line, we got to where we weren’t supposed to let kids just happen with us in life and let them see what we were doing. The village approach! And it all became presentation; it all became—we all started Martha-stepping our children! Well, first, I’ve got to make the gravel, and then I’m going to, you know, make the air! Right? Where explicit instruction, it was explicitly presented to them instead of them being allowed to observe it. And the truth is, is there’s—you know, life doesn’t come on flash cards, and the positive lessons that you could give your child is probably a lot more, and you’re a musician, play music! You play music! Just have your kid around while you play music! You’re not trying to teach them music! Right? You’re simply including them in that activity! And I think that they absorb a heck of a lot more from that passive teaching, which is experiential rather than presentational!”

“That’s right! That’s right! And a lot of I think what we do communicate to our children is the anxiety, the neurosis, like that we don’t—that we’re not trying to—I mean even if we stand there and say you must take risks and you must have adventures in your life, so much of what we’re doing is communicating, ‘Be afraid!’ Well, no, it totally is, be afraid! And—and it’s be afraid because, um, I cannot possibly allow my daughter to walk up the street to see a friend because 12 pedophiles will attack her along that way! Well guess what? There have always been monsters! And I’ve heard that in fact statistically, that like, we are mistaken in our belief that that is increasing even in urban areas. Paranoia is not a good parent! Paranoia is not a good parent! When I was a kid—and I’m 54—the bicycle was the single most important appliance! Because the bicycle was freedom! Right? Although my daughter learned how to ride a bike, it never became a tool of expression because she was never allowed to take it anywhere! Because no place is safe! No place is safe!”

“That’s right! And that’s what we get from being part of the tech generation that we’re in, and the internet generation, and the content generation, is that it is not safe to let a kid do anything!”

“I can’t remember when my daughter was first allowed to walk to a friend’s house! So imagine the discovery, the self-discovery that she’s been robbed of because we were so busy trying to keep her, quote, safe, unquote! Interestingly, also, when you think about kind of all the tech tools and the new cool apps that are supposed to help us, you know? And even things like food delivery services that are supposed to help us cook and plan meals and so on, everything that we’re doing now, we’re doing the same kind of explicit hand-holding and instruction to ourselves that we’re doing to our kids!”

“That is exactly true! Which means that, basically, I have made a living off of being an opportunistic parasite! I have simply jumped in and filled the gap where parenting stopped doing it! You know? Which is why my grandmother, before she passed away, still cannot believe I made TV shows on a network about cooking! She’s like, ‘Who would want to watch that?! Who would watch that?!’ I was like, ‘People are going to watch that!’ She’s like, ‘I don’t know!’ She didn’t watch it. She was on a show with me! She died.”

“Oh, yes, that’s right! First season! She did a biscuit show with me, and we had great fun, and she passed away very soon after that! But she would just shake her head and she could not imagine a culture where it would be popular to watch other people cook!”

“Yeah! We are a culture maybe of voyeurs in a way!”

“Well, we are! Yeah, most certainly voyeurs! But we also have a completely different mindset of what passes as entertainment for sure. And I mean going back to what we were saying about the Ethan Hawk video, I mean, how are you going to put yourself into dangerous, risk-taking territory if your entire culture is telling you to sit back and watch other people do things on the internet? Exactly! Or that we’ve made our kids so safe that the idea of risk is—is alien! You can’t suddenly turn to somebody coming out of college, having protected them with five-point harnesses and blah blah blah, and say, ‘Okay, it’s time to take a chance!’ Well, what the hell is that? What’s a chance?”

“Should we blame the attorneys? Is it—is it litigation that’s done this to us? There’s blame enough for every, you know, there’s blame when, when culturally you can’t—you can’t spank a child anymore because it’s perceived as abuse, child abuse. I have never spanked my child! She didn’t really need it! She was more petrified by having us be ashamed of her! I mean a look would always do it with her! Um, and she never had discipline problems! But I got the crap beat out of me! And sometimes for better and sometimes, um, it worked in a couple of cases! It was proper and right and made an indelible impression! And then the other times, it just pissed me off and was probably not judiciously and wisely administered! But the truth is, is we don’t let each other raise kids anymore! We don’t have a village; we have a bunch of people pointing fingers at each other!”

“That’s right! I’ll share a story quickly before we wind up! I went to Turkey! My wife is Turkish! I went—yeah! And I went to visit her! The first time I went to Turkey to visit her, we went near the Mediterranean somewhere, a little town, I think it was Kos or something along the Mediterranean coast! And we went out on a day cruise on one of these teak boats—highly flammable!”

“Highly flammable wood boat!”

“Yeah! Yeah! Run by this guy who obviously had been running it for 30 years! He goes out on the cruise! He opens a hiach, he takes a hefty bag—like a heft thick plastic hefty bag full of charcoal, puts it on top of the hiachi! There’s like six of us sitting within one foot of it on the steep boat! He dumps gasoline all over it and he lights it on fire! And I was like, you let the charcoal in the bag?”

“Yeah! Yeah! I love that!”

“I love that! Didn’t take the plastic; it’s smoking, and we’re all inhaling the fumes on the teak boat! And I’m like, ‘Darling, you ain’t in Kansas anymore!’”

“No! Not—that’s—he would be shut down six ways from Wednesday!”

“Um, but like in that same country, I was able to wander around these like ancient caves in Cappadocia without people kind of telling me not to look or do this or that! You know, we were able to rent a scooter, which we couldn’t have done in New York and go travel through the W, you know, wilderness! Like it was refreshing! I thought.”

“Yeah, but the thing is, you know, you’re going to be risk-averse! You have to admit one very simple fact: people die!”

“Indeed! That is the casualty! You’re going to lose some—a few children fall to their death! Kids, you know, put their eyes out with BB guns! Drown! People drown! This happens! And so we got to be willing to accept that!”

“Yeah, as a culture, you’ve got to be willing to say, ‘Look, there will be collateral damage!’ And there will be little boxes going into the ground! And that’s a math—that it’s tough for us to do! Like, once you know people think about that, it’s a little tough! You know, 100 years ago, you had five kids knowing two wouldn’t make it to puberty!”

“Right! Accepted!”

“And in some cultures, children are not actually considered human beings until they reach a certain age!”

“Oh, yeah!”

“Because the chances that they’re going to die is so high that it’s better to not actually think of them as humans; they’re larval! No, I’m serious!”

“Because it’s simply—the math is simply against them!”

“Right? You know, and so it's only once they become 5, 7, 8, I don’t know what the ages are in these various cultures—they’re not even humans yet! So, you know, we either treat every precious snowflake like it’s got to be protected no matter what to the potential detriment of everyone else or somebody’s going to die! There are going to be eyes put out with BB guns!”

“Interesting. Interesting!”

“These are—the trade-offs!”

“Alton, it has been really great talking to you today! Thanks for being on Think Again! I’ve really enjoyed—”

“Thank you! You got me thinking and—”

“And vice versa! And that’s it for this week's episode of Think Again with Alton Brown! Do me a favor! If you like the show, if you’re new to it or if you’ve been listening for a while and you haven’t done it yet, go on over to iTunes or Google Play or Stitcher or Podcatcher or any one of the other 20 million listening services that you might be using and rate and/or review the show! It means a lot to us, and it makes a very big difference in terms of the visibility or audibility of the show to all the people out there in the world! I want more people to hear it, and if you like it, I guess maybe you do too! Next week, we are joined by science writer James Gleick, who is here to talk about surprising things but also his new book about the history of time travel! See you!”

[Music] Then.