Andrew Zimmern on Why Travel Needs Trust in the AI Era

0:23Sarah Kopit: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Skiff Travel Podcast. This is a very special episode because we have a very special guest sarah normally does the interest but sarah is it okay if i i wrote a special intro for this episode is it okay if i i read it i think it's i think it's okay seth yeah okay i'm gonna i i wrote this i don't only write intros like this but i did it uh bear with me dear listener it's a bit roundabout but i've got it so i'd like to introduce very special guest this gift draw a podcast um yeah so i want to start i know we've got a global audience, but Sarah and myself, we are New Yorkers.

1:00Sarah Kopit: And there's something very special to New Yorkers, and that is pizza, New York pizzerias. Okay, these are very near and dear to our heart. And I've got a great, there's too many modern, trendy New York City pizzerias. They have these fancy ingredients, they have these Instagram influencers, they charge you 60 bucks for a pie, they're poser pizzerias. I promise I've got a point here, but it's true. So my favorite New York City style pizzeria is this slice shop near Penn Station. It's this old school place. It's still a kind of a grimy block. It's 60 years old. It's older than the Madison Square Garden itself.

1:34Sarah Kopit: And it's called New York Pizza Suprema. I love to go. It's like a platonic idea of a slice shop. And I'm sitting there at the slice shop. I'm thinking about this interview, this special guest we have coming. And I look up and what do I see? There's three photos hanging in this pizzeria New York Pizza Suprema. The first is their Nona, as it should be, their grandmother. The second is the late, great Anthony Bourdain. And who is the third photo that they deem worthy of being in this pantheon? It is none other than our very special guest, Andrew Zimmern. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

2:11My pleasure. Once a week, someone walks into Suprema and sends me that picture. that has a fascinating story behind it. I was imprisoned on the ninth floor of a warehouse building about two blocks away from the pizza place. And I was doing, I was recording a television show for Food Network called All Star Academy, which was one of my favorite shows that I've ever done. and because I love mentoring I love coaching I love teaching and um I this this show four culinarians each drafted so it was sort of a schoolyard pick situation uh two amateurs uh who love to cook and then you cooked food for nine episodes all kinds of different challenges and then a winner was determined there's a long story behind why i i felt we won that show and got ripped off but i purposely i purposely chose the two youngest i believe i won that show uh but as far

3:27Sarah Kopit: as we're concerned for the purposes of this podcast you won that show i should say my my my young cooks won that show both of whom i stay in touch with um and i say young because everybody else was in their 30s and 40s. And one of these young ladies was 19. The other one was in her early 20s. And they had the least experience, right? So I just said, give me those two right there. Because I just wanted people that, you know, I find young people just listen better, right? But I digress. We had to stay on set all day long because all kinds of different things would fire off at different times. They were always redoing takes, just the style of production of this shiny floor competition show.

4:10And the one rule that they had for talent was you do not leave the floor. So after like four or five days of this, Curtis Stone and I looked at each other and said, when everybody goes to lunch, right? When the union videographers aren't working, nothing can happen, right? So we're gone. and we we knew we had a limited amount of time so we just exploded out of there kind of jogged around i said there's this pizza place down the street it's it's good it's not great um i said some people think it's very good but it's just a new york slice shop i said i don't they piled a lot of ingredients on some people love this place i mean it has a very dedicated following i said i go for the absolute plain slice nice and crispy two of them uh and and that's my deal here and we went in and they took a picture and and put it up there and i literally just got two days ago somebody sent me the you know they take a picture of it go look where i am and it's suprema it is it it it is you know the it it's what a new york city pizzeria is supposed to be i i'm not a big fan of the you know what used to be the dollar slice places that have that magically when i went back for climate week um and uh unga 81 had turned a dollar 50 slice places uh i i take umbrage with the 60 pizza issue that you brought up i i think they're wrong

5:56Sarah Kopit: and you know you know the place i'm talking about it's a real place that sells a 60 pie

6:00Seth Borko: oh i i've eaten it uh there's now a 60 is it is it the one in carol gardens no right around

6:08Sarah Kopit: no it's in um it's in the i think it's in the lower east side i think it's in okay there are There are lots of pizza places that approach that type of, but it's more about the price value system in general, holistically with food that we're going through right now, this reckoning in America. I think there's a larger issue at hand. So I understand what it's like to be confronted with a$60 pizza. But if it curls your toes and makes you want to go back again, it's worth it, right? And so while there are plenty of other places that aren't charging that, I mean, I'll just name check a couple of places that are some of my favorites because they're all approaching that price.

7:01I mean, when you look at places as different as, and I'm talking about larger format pizza, right? Because none of the smaller format pizzas, Neapolitan style, more of an individual pie, get near that price unless they're putting precious ingredients on it, right? So Una Pizzeria Neapolitana does not charge$60 for a pie. It's fantastic. They do a smaller format. You order your pizza, obviously share with other people. If you're there with a crowd, order a bunch. Great. Um, but there's a, there's a, there's a sense of price value to me that if it, if it includes ingredients, if I see Cisco tomato sauce in number 12 cans in the back through the, through the door, um, that to me is a fucking ripoff and I'm pissed.

7:52And I tell them that if, if the employees are happy and they're rotating in and out And I and I meet the owner and he tells me that he, you know, shares profits with the team and he buys imported tomatoes from his cousin in Italy and has them brought over despite the silly tariffs. And he's managing the place the right way. And he says, you know, the the rent has changed here. I started at$400 a month. Now it's$40 ,000 a month. But I give my employees, I pay half their health care. That's all I can afford. I don't care if he charges$100 a pie. I'm going there to buy a pie. So it really is a matter of what you choose to support and where the price value is.

8:43Now, if you didn't like the$60 a pie pizza, different story. But I would imagine if it's the one that I think you're talking about that you did. I haven't tried it.

8:54Sarah Kopit: I haven't tried it because, well, see, it's a whole separate issue. The line is too long. Actually, my issue is not the price point. My issue is the line. I'm actually totally agree with you, Andrew. I'm willing to pay$100 for incredible food. I can't get in. All right. Let's talk about lines for a second and price because I want to get to this$60 loaf of bread, right? Oh, yeah. Mark Mauer. Sarah, do you know the$60 loaf of bread in New York City? No. Have you heard of this? No. That's a fucking outrage. But anyway, here's the deal. Wonder, you know Salt Hanks. It's a year old. It's a French dip sandwich place.

9:34They sell one item, the French dip sandwich. And it's founded.

9:37Sarah Kopit: I used to live down the block. It's founded by a social media influencer. I think it's super interesting because I didn't think of the guy as a chef. I thought of him as a social media. Hank was a social media guy. And he said, I think I can do this one thing. Great. And he did it great. And now he's swans. Yes. He's selling out. He's selling out. Wonder bought it for, you know, whatever, a hundred million dollars and made him a partner. And now, you know, he's rich for life. But essentially what Wonder was buying was not the$25 perfect hot beef sandwich, right? What Wonder was buying was the magic, the viral magic that is not recreatable in the business system that Wonder has created, right?

10:33I think it's an interesting, it'll be interesting as a test bunny, right? Let's see how popular Salt Hanks is and how many people buy it again through Wonder because I think what made Salt Hanks great was the anticipation of being on the line, of getting that first bite. Now, I happen to think it's a fantastic sandwich, okay? I would wait online and pay that price for a hot beef dip sandwich any day of the week. It reminds me the conviviality of the line. Sharing that experience with other people makes the sandwich taste better.

11:22Sarah Kopit: Taste better. How can you be the person who hates the sandwich when everyone is so excited about it? They're all saying it's amazing. And it's almost like you're primed to enjoy it. It does think the groupthink works. Yeah. It reminds me of that Yogi Berra quote. Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. I feel like all these New York food restaurant places. I'm like, no one goes there anymore. It's too crowded. I can't go there. I want to bring this. Can I just quickly bring this to travel? Because this is a travel podcast. And I think the phenomenon that we're talking about, lines, crowds, price, groupthink, you You could just as easily apply this to a French dip sandwich as you could to the Eiffel Tower or Bali or any of these destinations.

12:05Sarah Kopit: What's your take on that? On like these, the over, like the salt, for the purpose of this conversation, this isn't a word I'm coining, but the salt tankification, the lineification, the over tourism of it all. Of these, of these super popular destinations where everyone wants to go online to do the viral whatever tour or the viral whatever destination. What do you make of that? I think you can't yuck on somebody's yum. And I think that what people are often forgetting, I see a lot of people having this conversation in social media. I see people having this conversation on stages at conferences.

12:48I see people having this conversation in all kinds of places and i think what they're forgetting is that the vast majority of you the people who who go to paris and uh walk to the to the west side of it past on the lead to where there's that rise and you can get that great picture are people for whom a trip to paris might be the trip of a lifetime. And I think, I think we have unfairly created an elitist tier around travel where now you have influencers online and I've, I've been all around the world 25 times and I, I clock what shit costs and, and I know how hard it is to get to a place. And I know that, you know, that that little you know island you know past vanuatu is a three-day is a three-day trip so the person who's taken a couple of underwater photos you know with with their uh you know uh the iphone in an otter box right and you know it cuts together a little clip and says this is where you should go.

14:10It is that to me is a form of status strutting. It's a form of look at me, look at me, look at me that I find a little bit distasteful. Now I understand that's how social media works, right? The more unusual, the little corner place. I posted something on my Instagram a few weeks ago about a local sandwich and butcher shop that had gotten some buzz here in the Twin Cities. It's called Sweet Lose. And I went in there and I actually, I ate their hot beef sandwich because I happen to love those things. It's cheesy, it's beefy, it's yummy. um it's a young couple owns it uh it's by my office and you know my we put it up on social media and it it just blew a big number despite the fact that you know there's only so many people here in minnesota that follow me and i have a pretty large following in social aggregated and I think my, my social people put it out on all my other stuff.

15:27Um, and, uh, I got a friend who called me the next day and said, you know, I went over to sweet lose, uh, the, the other day to get that sandwich, you know, fuck you, because now there's a line out the block. And I know, I know what it's like to sort of find something great and and want to put it out there because you know people will be more interested in that right but i think that there is an elitism within the travel community about posting from certain places and then saying you're going to the wrong place And so I'm very careful when I post my travel columns, mostly on my sub stack, Spilled Milk, go to andrewzimmer.com.

16:27There's links to subscribe. When I post my stuff, I'm very careful to say, if you like this kind of travel, go here. If you like this kind of travel, go there. Because I would never want to tell you how much time I spent at the Coliseum when we shot our Rome episode. about 30 seconds i said we're just getting a shot of me outside it's a it's to me it was a big nothing now when my father took me there and i was like seven years old blew my mind my dad couldn't get me out of there but now it's a whole different it's a whole different vibe for someone who's traveled a lot than it is say for someone who is looking at paris as the trip of a lifetime

17:12Sarah Kopit: I think your point though is that the context is so important I am like a huge huge huge lover of history and I as a place like the Coliseum you go into them you go with a great tour guide or someone who knows it or really knows the history or that you've I mean maybe God forbid you do a little prep before your trip but maybe you've read the history and you can spend hours and I've talked to some people like what do you think this museum wasn't amazing and didn't you spend hours there? I'm like, oh, I just had to go because I had to go. So I think it's also like, yeah, we've been selling, as an industry, we sell these one-size-fits-all trips.

17:49Sarah Kopit: We sell these bucket lists. It's an interesting conversation. I've talked to tour operators before who claim to be these really unique, different eco-tour operators, take you off the beaten path, all that stuff. And I say, so why do you still go to the Eiffel Tower on your tour? Why do you still go to the Coliseum on your tour? I said, well, you gotta, you gotta. I cannot tell you how many complaints you get. And he said, well, this is a tour for adventurers or foodies or historians. Why do you go to this place? And they say, well, we can't sell the tour if we don't have the Coliseum on it. So I do think that there's been, like, too much of this, of, like, a bucket listification of.

18:25And I'm not doubting you. Have they actually phrased it that way? Like, we can't sell it without. Because this is interesting because I sell tours. Wow.

18:37Seth Borko: They have. I've heard. I've heard. Wow. Many, many people say that. Absolutely. Wow. That is, that is, that maybe, maybe it's different for me because with the tours that, that, that I, I do three or four of them a year with different partners. And I curate the trips and I go where I'm interested. Now that doesn't mean that we don't check off certain things, but you know, if we were going to go to Taipei, Taiwan, Haven't been there yet with my tour, but I've been there a lot on my own. I love Taiwan. I wouldn't take people to the top of Taipei 101 to take a look at the city from one of the tallest buildings in the world.

19:24It's a big waste of time. You know, the the going to certain places, if you have 10 days or two weeks is a waste of time versus going up into the hills to places where indigenous peoples lived and you can still get walk, toss dishes at restaurants that have bumblebees in them. The only time I've eaten that in my life and because it's a honey culture up there at the top of this mountain ridgeline. And then you stay at night in a Taiwanese version of an onsen where everyone has a private soak tub and windows that open up over this incredible vista. And that's what you do when you're there. And then you go for a certain meal back into town.

20:12To me, that's the traveling part of it. and we don't go to the roof of Taipei 101. So I find this conversation fascinating.

20:22Sarah Kopit: I think it's the difference partially too between a unique custom tour like yourself, like the ones that you offer, which we'll talk more about, and one that's designed for, frankly, a mass market. Was that a Russ and Daughters mug I just saw? Sorry, doesn't matter. Let me tell you something. five generations of zimmerns have eaten at russ and daughters we believe and i've talked about this with with josh and nicky who own it run it now um who were the descendants of of old joe russ who started with the pickle barrel and then moved into a store on houston street um um they're five generations we believe a sixth generation they they lived around the corner 18 people to a a three-room tenement apartment um and we just believe they couldn't have afforded it but maybe they bought something uh at a jewish holiday maybe they saved up a couple shekels and threw it down so maybe it's six generations but we know for sure locked five generations of Zimmern's because we have photographs, we have family connections, we have all of that.

21:43And this is, I just made my own whitefish salad with their whitefish last night that's sitting in my refrigerator for later on. I'm sort of a Russ and Daughters obsessive, but I think Nikki and Josh would say that the Zimmerns are family at Russ and Daughters, so I'm biased. But yes, this is my favorite coffee hug.

22:12Seth Borko: I have not. What? Sarah, I'm taking you there the next time I'm in New York. Yeah, I have not. I love taking people there who've never been there before only because they're like, how good could it be? And then they're like, okay, yeah. Yeah, I get it.

22:31Sarah Kopit: What I like about it is it's like also the weirder fish. It's like not the standard. Like you can kind of get smoked salmon everywhere, but they have like they have the Nova. They have this, they have that. They have the white fish. And you're like, what's the difference between all these different things? And you can really see it there. It's awesome.

22:47Seth Borko: Do they have like like real white fish, like from the Great Lakes and walleye and stuff like that, too? Yes. You know, rock and roll. Interestingly, there used to be a train in the 19th century that would go to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, all the eastern cities from Duluth called the Whitefish Express from Duluth, Minnesota, for those that maybe don't know. Because you could literally walk on the backs of whitefish and lake trout in the Great Lakes in the 19th century. Now they're much harder to find. There are established fisheries there, but they're very small. But they used to literally throw the fish into open topped railway cars and shovel ice on top and then make the 18 hour run to New York City at holiday time so that Jews all over the East Coast could make gefilte fish and cure and smoke their own white fish and all this.

23:50I mean, it's mind boggling to me that that was. Those were those were the days where, you know, that the effort had to be made for it. And I kind of want to go back in time because I, too, am a history geek and I want to go back in time and see what happened when the Whitefish Express pulled in and all the people with their wheelbarrows and their lorries and their horse carts taking it to be smoked and salted. or turned into filter fish. It must have been a glorious time to be alive. I think

24:28Seth Borko: fishing is making a comeback personally. I do too. I have a youth. I have a 15-year-old boy who if he could do one thing all day long that he is awake in his waking hours it would be fishing. He lives in Brooklyn. I've met all of these city kids all they want to do is fish if i could buy stock and bass pro shops i would i can't it's private me too but yeah i i think it's i think it's like a thing does he do any of the new york city uh kayak fishing in the rivers he doesn't do kayak fishing in the rivers in downstate he definitely does it upstate there are clubs that will there are clubs that will take you out i did it in one of my tv shows um oh really yes never say what i'm about to say to a mother i almost died but it was because we were we were the crew had to shoot they couldn't shoot into the sun so can you go to this area could you stick with yeah and there was a very swirling eddie and i just all of a sudden my kayak is headed 15 miles an hour for the side of a container ship and what people don't understand is these container ships are curved when they hit the water and you actually can just get swept under and kept there by the current and i was i was screaming into my mic come get me come because they're in a you know a 30-foot boat with twin 150s on them and i'm like get me out of here it was pretty hysterical but they're the the water now is so clean uh thanks to some of the river reclamation projects that have gone on there that right that i went diving for robsters yeah uh we were we were fishing for bass it was absolutely incredible and nowadays the the rigs you know that you can get on your kayak and just kind of go out and and fish all around uh the five boroughs is is pretty extraordinary yeah i'm just curious what what your thoughts are about travel media so like from like the days of the travel channel way back when to like social media now and like what you were just describing and you know filming yourself getting sucked under an eddy and in the river in the east river um how do you think that is impacting the travel industry like where people go like the migration of human beings around this planet i think it's effect a great question uh i think it's uh affected in a very major way because it's affecting every segment of society um now like like any other social or civic tentpole um this thing lies to you every single day

27:18Sarah Kopit: and holding up his phone for our audio only podcast listeners yes i'm holding up i'm holding up my phone um the reason being that there's so much disinformation out there right there are um faceless voice over ai travel accounts that have a million followers and i'm like this this thing has never visited that island in it it's never been to ischia right but it's got pictures of Iskia. It's got all the pretty beaches and all the rest of that. And it's telling people that this is, you know, the greatest price value in Europe. And I'm just like, Iskia is really expensive and it's kind of tough to get there.

28:04It's a small island. You go through Capri to get there for those that don't know where Iskia is. And it's really expensive to stay there. And it's booked out years in advance in the summertime. And you really don't want to go to Iskia in the wintertime. You want to go there in the late spring, summer, early fall where you can swim in the water. That's the whole point of being there is the relationship to the water, eating things that come out of the water, looking at the water from wherever you're staying, swimming in the water, boating on the water. It's a rocky island. Ischia is phenomenal. Truman Capote sort of turned the world onto Ischia, in my opinion, in the same way that Somerset Maugham turned us on to so many of the South Sea Islands.

28:55But I think that all of the social media accounts have, everyone is trying to create their own micro economy. So what it's forcing travel influencers, I'll just use that bucket to label everyone. What it's forcing travel influencers to do is like, oh, shit, I was going to post about this boat noodle place in Bangkok. But I can see that, you know, Mark Weins or Drew Pinsk. I'm just I'm just name checking people who have, you know, millions and millions of people. I see they've already done that. by the way i have a lot of respect for people like like mark and drew and and folks like that who actually are the the new legitimate sort of explorers within their genres uh both of whom love southern asia um and rightly so yes oh no no absolutely and so they then have to pick some other place so they they're just like okay i'm going to pick this kanji place across the street And sometimes people like me know that that's not only not the best kanji place in Bangkok, in Bangkok's Chinatown.

30:21It's not even the best one on that block. Right. And so consequently, I think this device has created a, the device is the problem. Right. it's like a drug for people who are at 800 ,000 followers got it what do I need to do to get to a million I hear all the time I see people posting things here's my a lot of times with recipes but also with restaurants in foreign locations travel uh this is my post from last year that went viral right so you know the minute someone oh I gotta watch that I gotta follow this person um and who who knows what happened to it it it it is it is skewed it has skewed the relationship because now instead of eight nine ten global travel experts that we had i'm making up in the 50s or 60s and i want to be clear i am not arguing for us to go back in time right that that you you cannot do that.

31:28That happens in sci-fi movies. But we now have millions of people, thanks to our phones and the internet, who are labeled as experts. And it's difficult. The disinformation part is finding someone to trust, someone who has been there, someone who's actually giving you information for you as a consumer to make the decision about where to spend your dollars, because dollars are becoming increasingly precious in this world. The cost of traveling is skyrocketing, and inflation in this country is out of control. Our debt is crazy. Everyone's house is technically worth less because you don't have a potential buyer for it.

32:13A lot of our systems are collapsing. Therefore, if you have some disposable income with which to travel, I hope people are listening to trusted resources.

32:27Seth Borko: There's that word. I love how we've... Trust, Seth. Trust. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seth and I have been talking about this. We think that the word of 2027 is going to be trust. I agree with you. You know, it used to be my opinion. We've gone through several years of what we call the attention economy. And I think what's happening, and I think it's actually happening now, I don't think you have to wait till next year, is that we are entering a trust economy with everything. Who do you trust about the value of your house, right? Who do you trust about where you're going to travel? Who do you trust about that restaurant?

33:02What's really interesting, I spent the last 20 years of my life on a lot of panels, right? And whether it was SDG panels at, you know, UNGA in New York every year, South by Southwest, any of these big confabs.

33:22Sarah Kopit: Sustainable Development Goals at UN General Assembly translated for the for those in the back. Thank you. um i i was always on these panels with this incredibly vibrant exciting smart i mean she was the smartest person on every panel i ever got on um named dr sweta chaktaburi she's uh out of dc and she is one of the world's foremost behavioral scientists and she has said something that i i I don't think I've done an interview where I haven't brought her up in the last year or two as trust has become the coin of the realm. she told me once, she said that the greatest indicator of change in human behavior and influence, right, is the trust relationship between the listener and the person who's doing the talking.

34:25So if you believe that what I am saying is true, then you will find Dr. Chak Taburi's stuff fascinating. If you do not trust me, you're like, well, that guy doesn't know what he's talking about. She's probably a crank just like him, right? So I'm exaggerating to make a point. So you are spot on correct. I mean, trust is what it is all about. It's not the hokey pokey.

34:50Sarah Kopit: Can I ask, and given that we do trust you as a Rustin Daughters fan and a Pizza Suprema fan, we trust you. And I have two questions about trust, actually, that I want to talk about. I'll ask one first, but I think I have two questions. The first is like, we have all these social media creators, but you're sort of a traditional media person. And I feel like people who came from traditional media still have trust. And the Drew Binsky's of the world kind of struggle to break into that. So I feel like we've moved to this creator economy, but the people that we trust most as creators are still the people with the traditional travel TV media background.

35:26Sarah Kopit: I wonder if you have any thoughts on that. like you are still super highly trusted you're becoming kind of more of a creator i see you post on youtube but like i don't know what do you think about that like is it going to be possible i've always been a creator i mean we social media creator social media creator no no but i think i think your words matter and i think your words are really interesting um because i i i'm asked this question all the time you know like you're you're now a creator and i'm like dude i've been making shit since i was 20 years old i'm 65 you know um i've been cooking since professionally since i was 14 when i got my first summer job in a restaurant and i've never stopped that's 51 years uh in restaurants so if if someone doesn't think i know about how restaurants work they're fucking out of their minds right um so i i i think i've earned that trust but i've always been a a creator and by the way there are lots of people who don't like me and that's fine um they they'd rather like that person over there i mean there's that's why there's chocolate vanilla and strawberry ice cream i mean you know it's like doesn't mean you don't like ice cream um I've always been creating.

36:43Obviously now in an effort to reach the most people, I am creating in the new media spaces. And I love it. I mean, to me, it is the exact same thing as when I made TV, except it's more immediate. it. There are less layers of people telling me what to do. That's both dangerous and exciting. The exciting part is, you know, you don't have as many rules. The dangerous part is that some of those rules brought other voices into the room before the media went out who would influence what that content was like in a positive way. I'll give you an example. In restaurants, when a chef puts all his money in and doesn't have a business partner and doesn't have another partner who runs the room and decides to do it on their own, they're typically doomed to fail.

37:49You can't do all three jobs. You also need an editor. You need someone as a chef to tell you that dish is delicious no one's gonna buy it right do you call that person an editor well no i they're they're usually your business partner your your your your buddy who you've worked with before okay the general manager running the front of the room um but i call them editors in life i call everyone i i love i love it and the reason that i call it editors i was never a writer um until i got a job writing and my first job writing uh real job writing uh was for minneapolis saint paul magazine which is our award-winning you know statewide glossy monthly uh every big city has one and if you're in a state like minnesota that magazine is kind of sold border to border right and um i started out doing one column i wound up doing five uh every month uh until i just couldn't do it anymore because i was doing too much television um and it was a restaurant review and a little recipe and a small editorial and a blurb about a new spot that was was not yet ready to be reviewed but people should watch out for so they weren't all big columns but i just had a big presence in that magazine and my editor was a man named adam platt not the same one that wrote for uh new york magazine and um but he got reservations easily in restaurants in the city whenever he called um and he really connie mayer my high school english teacher and adam platt were the ones that taught me the most about writing and thankfully for them they were my editors what i produced was better because they went through it and guided me on how to polish it and what to change i think in life we need editors when we're left to our own devices in our thinking our feeling in our actions we make more mistakes the human ego is designed sadly to want to make internal decisions but but sarah you mentioned your kid um are you married i am okay so when you when you reach out when you've got an issue with your son yeah i think you said your son uh when you when you just walk up to him and start mouthing off whatever you're thinking or feeling uh you you get one kind of reaction but i would i would wager uh because he's 15 uh so i can intuit this is my sherlock holmes part you've been married for a while that when you when you when you turn to your husband at nine o 'clock at night on the couch and you say honey i've been thinking what about x y and z with our kid And he says, oh, that's a really interesting thing.

40:53How about ABC? And you say, oh, that's interesting. You wind up coming out with MNO and you go and talk to your kid and you get a much different reaction because you've had a chance to bounce. You had a chance to talk to an editor about this. He may agree with you 100 % and polish it and make it better. He may bring up something that changes your mind about it. he may say something that is completely lunacy and you think to your, or you say, honey, you're absolutely crazy and you're missing the point. And it reinforces that you were right all, but what's going to happen is you're going to have a much more successful conversation, right?

41:39Having co-regulated with someone else before you operationalize, right? Now, whether you are in a restaurant in that business, the travel business, anything, you need an editor, someone with whom to co-regulate so that before you operationalize, you have a better shot at operationalizing.

42:01Seth Borko: I firmly believe all human beings in almost everything, just as you said, are better off for an editor. Absolutely. By the way, for those that are listening and or watching, there's a live chat that we can all see and in it someone was me right the producer was it you said says yeah sarah is our editor-in-chief so of course you're of course you love editors no in all seriousness i love editors too and and i love being other people's editors an editor isn't a bad thing an editor helps you make your stuff stronger better faster tastier whatever you need partners you need other voices in your life and i i find that and and i'll give you a great example these these travel i know where i want to go i know where i want to take people but i just i was gonna ask you and i have partners in the travel space who are like that's at that hour of the day.

43:07Remember Mr. Romanticized, like we have to go to Trattoria Sostanza on night three in Florence. You know, one of my favorite restaurants in the world. They tell me it's going to take 90 minutes to get there and then an hour to get back to the hotel and we have to pack the next day. So maybe we move and then I slam my hand on the table. We have to eat there. And they're like, okay, let's move it to night one. And I'm like, oh, that's a great idea. So now we're going to Trottoria Sostanza. No one's in the bus for 90 minutes. And everything works. You need editors in life. We are animals. We are designed for sitting around with other people in the cave, hashing out the issues of the day by painting on the walls.

43:51That is in our DNA. And we do not, in today's day and age that's so modern, that's AI filled, we now are relying on too much self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency in the 19th century and the 18th century used to be what made America great, right? I mean, you can read it in all the books. Seriously.

44:12Sarah Kopit: Bootstraps, baby. That's how Russ and Daughters got their start, right? We can do it on our own. And I think in the modern day and age, what I call the globalist society, and I spoke about this at the SCIF conference last year, from the stage. We are living in a globalist environment. You cannot, self-sufficiency does not work anymore. Full stop, period, exclamation point. Let me ask you a travel question, Andrew, and we're going to have to wrap in just a little bit, but I want to talk about your tours because you're running tours now. You're a trusted creator, lifelong creator with lifelong trust.

44:52Sarah Kopit: You're running tours. I see you're going to a couple really cool places. And a couple of other good ones coming up. We're about to announce a whole bunch of cool new ones for 2020, end of 27 and 28. Do you want to give us a little scoop on this podcast? Tell us where you're going to go. I have to think about that. Contractually, I don't believe I can. However, I will say this, and this is not a shameless plug as it sounds, but we do announce my trips several days in advance to buy spilled milk audience. So if you subscribe to spilled milk, you're going to hear about it a couple of days in advance.

45:32But we have something that I believe is so unique and different that actually is like a clubhouse hang in another country as opposed to roving around all the time. I think people sometimes just want to plots down and just be in a place. Yeah. And so it's called a cruise. People love it. It's the best selling travel product in the world. We're going to try that. We're going to try that on land in a really dreamy location. But I, you know, for 25 years, people would write me and say, how do we travel with you? And because they would watch my TV shows and I would, I didn't respond back with my head.

46:15I'm like, never, because those were the days where it took eight, nine, 10 days to make an hour of television, not three or four. And I was 35 weeks a year on the road and I had a young child at home and, you know, a family. I mean, I had stuff. I had to be home. I'm not getting up and going and traveling with a stranger. I travel too much already. Right. so uh the years go by and eventually a friend uh called me and said you know i manage this company we'll let you curate it we'll let you do you know you get to approve everything and i said including where we stay because that's very important to me i'm a hotel geek and uh they're like yeah and i said okay i don't know why i did i just did and that trip just sold out right away and i took a group to sicily and off we went and i me andrew had so much fun basically with 20 strangers um and was became friends with somebody i was okay let's do this again and now i've done five trips in i'm going to oaxaca in november i'm going incredible food city thailand incredible in what we're trying to say different with that it's a long weekend in oaxaca because everyone's travel style is different so it's interesting how we have a lot of people like from new york and texas and la where there's direct trips where they're like people are turning to their partners spouses friends, whatever, and saying, Hey, you want to do five days in Oaxaca?

48:01This sounds pretty juicy. And it's, you know, it's not a big time commitment. You don't take that much time off from work and it's less expensive. And we're staying in one spot. You do not change hotels. I think that to me is a fun way to travel and go to different places on the converse. We're going to, uh, you know, Thailand and going to three or four different, uh, places over the course of 12 days and then i have a whole bunch of trips coming up that are going to be uh announced we we had like 500 people on the wait list for the oaxaca trip i was i was stunned so i'm sure we're going to be going back there or doing more trips like that and we have some really cool new i think travel products and and i would say this i did what's a new wait what's a new what's a new travel product like beyond this idea of going i i don't want to i can't really give it away but but it's a

48:57Seth Borko: okay it's a way of contractually obligated seth there's a way of well i'm an editor a good editor would push me to ask sarah pushes me to ask absolutely my job absolutely i respect uh the it is it is a new way of doing things that i think is brilliant and one of my travel partners came up with this and ran it by me and i was just like he said would you like to do that i he says i think it will work i'm like oh my god yes that's gonna that's like hands down slam dunk like very very cool but we're gonna be going we're gonna be going all over the world i'm trying uh do you know that there's there's one very my favorite country to travel through um is china um and i'm obsessed with China.

49:49I've been about 20 times. I adore it. I love the food. I love the people. The traveling is real. You feel like you're voyaging. I think it challenges you. You don't speak the language. You have to have a guide. There are a lot of rules. So consequently, you're asking a lot of questions and you're being more vulnerable. So you learn a lot in China about yourself and you bring that back home. You import it back into your life. And I think visiting places like that makes you a better human being. So we're going, I'm trying to find, well, I'm trying to convince some of my partners, like, let's go to China.

50:36So hopefully that's in the future too. I just did a cruise this summer. I'm meeting with the group again. I'm not a cruise guy and i had the best time everyone says that i'm not like some cruise aficionado but everyone says that well i'll tell you something you get on a mitsui boat out of japan and you go into the cafeteria that on a normal cruise ship is serving the stalest grossest slop on a tray and you're just like i get it it's free but why would i eat here this is disgusting and you go on a mitsui boat and i'm i kid you not night one we're on the boat we did four days in tokyo then we got on the boat we went to a couple cities we got off we stayed in some of those cities so the boat was really a vehicle and and was a part-time player but i went to the cafeteria on night number one in the boat because I wanted to see on this Japanese cruise ship because everything was wood and it was beautiful and clean.

51:40There was a level of service that you would only get in Japan by a Japanese owned boat sailing under a Japanese flag. And I go down to the cafeteria and there is a sashimi display on ice. The size of my dining room table, by the way, there's only like 70, 80 people in the cafeteria. They don't run huge crowds out of these boats. And I had a meal, Japanese meal, that was better than every Japanese restaurant in my hometown except for one. On a cruise. On a cruise. It blew my – and the level of service. You talk about trust. You're on a giant cruise line, insert name here, but you know the ones I'm talking about.

52:29And you give up your bad – People say their names. So we'll take your bag and we'll put it out. In my head, I'm like, I may never see my bag again. When the Japanese crew says we'll be, there's literally you, I don't know how they do it because they don't have that many employees. You walk off the boat and there's your two bags and a person with a sign with your name on it, you know, giving you a nice little good morning. And you take your bags and my mind is blown. How do they do this?

52:59Sarah Kopit: Mitsui is very cool. Similar to restaurants, staffing and talent is the name of the game. It's the most important thing, and the Japanese do it really well, and others really struggle with it. I think we're coming to the end of this episode. I wanted to ask you just quickly, and I know, Sarah, you're going to have to jump, so I'm sorry, but you said you were a hotel geek. I would love to just hear some of your favorite hotels and favorite things about hotels as a final thought before we go, because we've got a lot of hoteliers in the audience, and I'm sure they would love to hear from you. what's what's your favorite hotels and features of a hotel well i'm i'm i'm about to contradict myself but here hear me out new new new new new in something old old old old old and the best the best examples of that it's everything from the the four seasons in in rome to the grand hotel europe in St.

53:59Petersburg.

54:01Seth Borko: Have you ever been to the OO in London? The raffles? Excuse me? The raffles that's in the Office of War Operations where Winston Churchill ran World War II? Just stayed there last year. Yeah, it's amazing. The, if you, I mean, but it also extends to little palapas on the beach in, you know, Appia in Samoa. not American Samoa, Samoa, where the light bulb is changed and it's hooked up to a car battery a quarter mile down the beach. Uh, but they have wifi. I mean, it boggles my mind, but that's bringing something really new into something really old. Um, so the, the grand hotel Europe is always my example to everyone.

54:50I just assume stay there. I, I felt like Eloise, you know, I've been there twice. It's 250 years old. The staff lines up when you check in, you're assigned a butler. Your room is immaculate with with museum art on the walls. The the bed is hundreds of years old with, you know, a sixty thousand dollar, you know, mattress, horse hair mattress, probably. Yes. And, you know, they they they still have the caviar bar there from 150 years ago in the main dining room where you take breakfast is the stage where every great musician of the last 200 years has played. But they have a list that they keep adding to there.

55:34So like Jenny Lind, the famous Swedish songbird Stravinsky, you know, you know, Mozart, all these people played on that stage. right? The cigar bar downstairs, there's more people with guns. And I don't mean this to sound dangerous. It's just every bodyguard is asked to kind of wait outside unless you were an actual world leader and they can't separate from you, in which case their security is kind of roving around looking. But the cigar bar is several rooms. You can order food in there. You can order out in the hotel bar. I'm 35 years sober at the grand hotel Europe. I am there from nine o 'clock at night till it closes at two in the morning because the people watching is probably my favorite place to sit in the entire world, just to watch oligarchs and movie stars and world leaders and the security and the, the, just the whole thing, the swirl of it all just is, is mind boggling.

56:41It's an ancient hotel that has everything is updated constantly all the time. It has its own. It goes back to a time and it has it where the hotel has its own flower shop, chocolate shop. You go down the lower level and has all their own stores. There's a spa there that's all white tile with lots of steam coming in. And I think you have to be an 80 year old woman with hands like hams. I've never felt stronger. I mean, there's there's you know, that moment in when you pay for a three hundred dollar massage and they take their hand and they run it down your back just to let you know that they're there and it's meant to relax you.

57:21The first move from these ladies is to dislocate both your shoulders and then put them back. It was the most painful experiences of my life. And I would do it again tomorrow. I've never felt better.

57:34Sarah Kopit: that's the real way to do it like in a like in a hammam or like in georgia or russia where they beat you up and they really make you you pay yes and then they put you back together yeah

57:47Seth Borko: well andrew i can't think of a better way to close than that the ham hands um thank you so much for being on the skiff travel podcast today and telling us some of your stories thank you great to great to be here with you by the way um you guys said something before about uh seth you were a history buff and and i think we've all referenced books and stuff um i encourage people to read fiction about a place before they go you know read hemingway before you go to spain read somerset mom before you go to the south sea islands read read what the great writers of their day said about a place. I love guidebooks.

58:31I love reading technical data. I'm a history major from college. So I want to know the history. But the first thing that I read about a place is the fiction that was written there. And I always do it from a visitor's point of view. I've never found anything that Informed my own opinions or affected Me more when I traveled than Reading that kind of stuff So I'll leave you with that

59:02Sarah Kopit: Oh and andrewzimmern.com no paywall Andrewzimmern.com great place To read it he's got he's got books He's got tours he's got trips he's got Shows and Spilled milk where you're gonna find out his new tours Andrew Zimmern thank you so much for being here I think that is wonderful advice to end on. Thank you. Thank you.

59:23Seth Borko: All right. See you next week, everybody.