Where does the fire come from?

Revisiting my interview with Anthony Bourdain.

This is an oldie but goodie.

If you’ve arrived here by way of The Process, you’ve likely read this interview before.

To date, it’s one of the most popular pieces I’ve ever written. Today, I decided to finally give it a permanent home here on Substack.

Leeches, Dysons and vices.

When I’m mauled by writer’s block, I reach for ChatGPT.

I don’t ask it to write for me. For a writer, this is like digging your own grave. Instead, I ask it to pretend to be someone I admire—and then I demand it interview me.

This is how I got interviewed by the late, great Anthony Bourdain.

If you’ve read Bourdain, you know damn well he isn’t a particularly easy tone to match—even for a multi-billion dollar language mode.

So, admittedly, I massaged the questions some. As I went about this massaging, I pulled lines directly from his tell-all memoir, Kitchen Confidential.

This was our conversation...

Where does the fire come from?

One of my earliest memories is sitting on the floor of my mother’s bathroom, playing with this heap of bobby pins, clips and hair ties. She is seated in a low chair, straightening her hair in the mirror. When she isn’t looking, I pick up the straightener and press it against my hand. I wail like a banshee.

As I write this now, I can see the scar it left between my thumb and forefinger. It’s gorgeous, resembling a distant galaxy. I suppose it sounds rather masochistic, but I’ve forever had to fight the urge to do it again. I used to believe that I was attracted to pain like a moth to a flame. But, I’m not—I’m attracted to what comes after.

You burn yourself as a kid and call it beautiful. If you aren’t chasing pain, what is it then?

Self-discovery.

And what have you discovered about yourself lately?

I can’t sit still.

Tell me more.

One summer my parents took my brothers and me up to Quebec to visit our Aunt Martha. She had this comfortable little cabin overlooking a massive lake. It was so vast, you couldn’t see from one side to the other. At first, I mistook it for the sea. When my mother told me it was a lake, I didn’t believe her until she had me swish the water in my mouth and taste the absence of salt.

When we would swim in this lake, my Aunt Martha would warn us not to remain in one place for too long because of the leeches. And so I was constantly swimming and thrashing about. I’m realizing now—after thirty-two years on this planet—I never stepped out of that lake.

As long as I keep moving, the leeches don’t have time to sink their teeth into me. I can’t remember the last time I’ve remained in one place geographically for more than two maybe three weeks.

You know, I suffered from the same ailment.

So I have read.

Why is it you want to sit still?

It’s not so much that I want to sit still. I want to find peace. I think the only way a person can find peace, is by becoming entirely okay with sitting still—especially in the moments when they want nothing more than to run like hell.

So let the leeches crawl on you?

Exactly.

Does that feeling of melancholy bleed into the work you’re doing with your agency?

I don’t think it’s so much the melancholy itself but the understanding of human emotion and—in a much broader sense—the human experience. I’ve often said that advertising is the process of moving folks closer to pleasure or further from pain.

I know this might seem commonsensical. But, you wouldn’t believe the number of agencies and brands who never consider the deeper feelings of their customers. They think someone purchases a Dyson because their floors are dirty. But, humans are much more nuanced than this.

If you disagree, fall in love. You will quickly discover how complicated we all are. Nobody purchases a Dyson because their floors are dirty. They purchase a Dyson because a clean house is the one aspect of this entire goddamn world they have any sort of influence over.

It’s about control in a world gone to shit.

Precisely.

There are people with a mission, and there are people who just want to get through another shift. You strike me as the former.

I’d like to think so.

So, what’s the dream for the agency?

It’s less of a dream and more of a pending reality. Honey will be among the greatest creative agencies in the world. It will be in the same conversation as Ogilvy.

Have you always been this sure?

I remember about a year ago, I announced I was starting the agency with my brother, Conner. While I had garnered a bit of notoriety as a writer—and he a sharp marketer—we were brand new to the world of advertising. Neither of us had any agency experience.

To make a name for ourselves, we began creating concept ads. Several dozen agency veterans began coming after us publicly. But, even then, I had complete conviction surrounding what we were building. A year later, we signed Avis. They do about $11 billion in revenue each year. Give us two to three years and we will be working with Apple, Ford, McDonald’s—every titan you can think of.

Confidence bordering on arrogance—I like it.

Selectively. My brother and I are below average at most things. However, we’re smart enough to know not to play games we can’t win. We aren’t going to try and make a living playing poker, chess, badminton or the markets.

But, by God, we know how to play this advertising game. We’re ruthless, too. We wrote down the names of every one of those advertising veterans—I’ve got them in a cigar box on my desk—and we plan to beat the fucking brakes off every last one of them. Creatively, of course.

Is there anyone you wouldn’t step into the ring with?

Greg Hahn over at Mischief.

Mischief’s got teeth.

Indeed.

When I got a taste of what my life could be after Kitchen Confidential, I wanted it all. I wanted the world. And I wanted it now. I think that spurred in me a sense of urgency. I created constantly.

Yeah, you were prolific.

You were this way for a long time. But, you’ve seemed to slow down as of late. Tell me—why’d you stop flooding the world with content?

In my twenties, I wanted to be relevant. Now that I’m in my thirties, I want to be permanent. I have found the desire for relevance is an enormous distraction from permanence. So, I’ve stopped chasing relevance.

Creating work that is profound enough to achieve permanence—be it an enterprise, an agency, an album, a collection of poetry, etc—requires an extraordinary amount of time and attention.

Relevance is a cheap high.

At this point in my career, I’d much rather follow the Frank Ocean playbook. Create a masterpiece. Ship said masterpiece. Then, turn into a ghost while I work on the next masterpiece. Rinse and repeat.

Let’s talk about vices—you got any?

Cigarettes.

Christ. How’d they get you? Was it the advertising?

Years ago, I met this woman out in Los Angeles. We would fuck and afterwards, we would step outside and smoke a cigarette. We would go back inside, fuck again and then step back outside and smoke another.

Eventually, things fell apart at the seams. Moths were eating away at the fabrics of our relationship. We didn’t know it until it was too late. We stopped fucking but—wouldn’t you know it—I kept smoking. That’s how I got hooked on cigarettes.

That’ll do it. Would you ever lend your pen to a cigarette brand?

I couldn’t in good conscience. As brilliant as the Marlboro Man campaign was, something like five out of six of those cowboys dropped dead from cancer—and the only one that survived chose not to smoke.

So, you’re going to quit?

Eventually.

Take your time. Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

Okay, I’ll pick up another pack.

Alright, what else?

What else—what?

What other vices?

Substack. It reminds me of the early days of Twitter—before Musk fucked it up. I deactivated my Instagram a month or so back. I imagine I will reactivate it for my upcoming book release. But, far and away the most interesting work I’m doing these days is on Substack.

Substack, huh? Where can we find you on there?

cole.rip

Writers tend to be their own worst critics. What’s the last thing you wrote that made you feel like—yeah, that one mattered?

My uncle killed himself back in June. He was five, maybe six, years older than me. So, growing up he was more like a brother than an uncle. One day, he told his mother he was going out to buy a pack of cigarettes. Then, he climbed to the top of her condo and threw himself headfirst off the roof.

When I heard the news, it just annihilated me. A few days later, I boarded a redeye to nowhere and tried to make sense of it in the air. Towards the end of the flight, a poem came pouring out of me like a torrential rain. It’s called Fallen Angel. That one felt like it mattered.

I’m sorry, man. That’s rough.

C’est la vie.

Alright, you’re getting restless. Let’s wind this down. What’s got you leaning forward in your seat?

Honey—but you already know that. We’ve been building a new site. I will unveil that soon. We also made three full-time hires over the past couple of months: Jeremy Raley (Chief of Staff), Jake Hackman (Senior Copywriter) and Nin Ivaturi (Senior Designer & Editor). While that’s tremendously exciting, it also comes with a hell of a lot of responsibility. I want to do right by them. I want to build something they’re excited to be a part of. And, I want to tear off the ceiling so they can sail for the moon.

At times, I feel like my brother and I are sitting atop one of those winged dinosaur-looking mother fuckers in Avatar. We’re just fighting like hell to stay on. Conner has the temperament for it. I’m developing the temperament. I probably would have been bucked off in my twenties. But, I have what it takes to stay on now.

What’s that?

The space between my ears. It used to be a war zone. But, it’s slowly becoming a zen garden surrounded by a stone wall with razor wire.

And leeches?

And leeches.

By Cole Schafer