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Richard Betts

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237
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2015-10-05
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2015-10-05
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  1. “Yeah. Ideally, you've read something before you get there, or you have more than a passing interest. But that's a coarse slash exam that's very much meant to inspire. Like, hey, here's the cool world of wine. And if you're into it, you're going to read about it, check it out, build yourself a plan to acquire the knowledge, and then come back and see us for more exams as you go. So that's the first one. The second level is the certified exam because there's a new organization.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “There's an introductory lecture and exam, and that's not a very hard test. But you have to know a little something. If you're a quick learner, you can pick it all up in the lecture. Then there's the certified.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Which is a certifying body for sommeliers, and it's there for exams in the process. And I'd taken the first one while cooking that first restaurant in Arizona.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “I said, Hey man, I want to work with you. This is why I'm in Arizona. And he said, great, what have you been doing? I told him how about my work with Alzeman, the other chef. And he's like, okay, cool. Well, why don't you audition? So you spend a week auditioning in the kitchen and doing all this different stuff. At the end of the week, we sit down in his office and he's like, okay, so I understand you've also been spending time learning about wine. I was like, yeah, yeah, doing this and passed my first court of master solemniz exam.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Then this was in Tucson. And you're like, well, why would you go from Montana to Tucson, another place that's not necessarily known as a culinarily important hotbed? I went to Tucson after going to Portland and San Francisco both, and this is in ninety seven, ninety eight, and I believe in myself and really believe that in my ability to make a decision, to do something I love, and then when I'm doing it, then I'm going to put everything I have into it. And in the best at it, I have no idea, but I know I'll try harder than most. So I went to Portland and it's like, man, there's so many kids getting into the food scene that I'm just going to have to get in line with these kids. And then I went to San Francisco, same story, like just super expensive to be here, although less than now, but also just huge lines of kids competing for positions. And then there were these two chefs that I wanted to work for in Tucson that were actually great, well regarded on a national level, and nobody wanted to move there to work with them. So it's like, I can get immediate access, supercharged my learning and my path. And I did. So I went to that second.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yeah, or hey, you know, you're special tonight, where's the acid at? Is it going to work with a sovium blanc or is it lower acid and I should use Chardonnay? Or, hey, I saw you put Sorel with grapes. And how is that going to work with this? You know, those sorts of things. Cool. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, it's super cool.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “I'm on the line cooking. Like, do this, do that. And, you know, it was like a free swing. Because I didn't have to face the guest. Yeah, yeah, it didn't have any consequences. Totally, practice without consequences.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Yeah, the pig farm down the road. Everything goes in there. And so, I mean, that's what got me into it in the first place, because I picked up that bottle of wine, I didn't know anything about it, but that sensory memory got me to blow off law school, right? So I kept on that path, like, okay, well, what is it about this place that makes, you know, that's a common thread amongst these wines, be it Merlot or Cabernet or whatever it may be? And when you can take that trip in a glass of wine, that's the intellectual value. That's the part that matters in how I convince myself I'm getting smarter when I'm drinking.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Exactly, exactly. And ultimately, the intellectual value of wine comes from this idea of terwir, and teroir, the French word for this notion that everything that makes up the wine makes up the place that goes into the wine is this idea of terroir. So you should pick up a glass and it should reflect a place, just like that ordinary bottle of wine. Soil.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Things I hadn't had before. In areas I wanted to explore. So, you know, I don't drink much Chilean wine today, but at that point I was like, okay, people are talking about this. So what is this about? So then it was a deep dive into Chile. What are these things about? How do they relate to each other? Is this one just an outlier or how does it fit in the context of the whole really very methodical about that?”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Up to that point. Yep. I spending still had basically no money. You're earning minimum wage. And I spent every dime I could on every bottle of wine I could find.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “If you didn't use a rubber spatula to get the gloss, the intense beef protein that you worked on two days to reduce down from beef bones, if you didn't use a rubber spatula to get that out of the pan, he would dock your paycheck and make you make soap. It was a real learning experience. You made everything. Nothing came in a box. So while I worked for him, that's where I had this Greard Ann position where you're on the grill and it was 130 degrees all night. It was also where the waiters had to walk by. And they knew that I was really into wine. So then they started asking questions like, oh, I know, Richard, you know the wine list? And like, what should I pair with this? What should I pair with that? So I became the sort of de facto volunteer sommelier from the kitchen.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Exactly that. Yeah, I mean, it was actually no different than geology. You only know what sandstone is because it relates to mudstone and it's more coarse grain. And you know that mudstone is only mudstone because it's more coarse grain than siltstone. So on and so forth. That's to geek out on, but yeah, it's just how things relate to each other. So I was taste taste tasting. We left Montana about 11 months later, almost to the day. So we moved there, we bought a house, an old house, remodeled it, the sun went away, as I said, and I'm a solar powered kid grown up in the southwest.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Yeah, so I was while in the kitchen I was always reading about wine. I knew that I wanted to do both, cook and work as a simulier. I thought working in the back of the house made the most sense to start. I do like that self-reliance of really learning how to feed yourself and feed others and make your table warm and interesting. That matters to me. So I started there, but all the while read, read, read, taste, taste, taste, and I had an early mentor who said, beg borrow steel, but taste, taste, taste. And that's the everything. If you don't have a context, and we'll talk more about that later, but if you don't have a context, you don't have any framework within which to hold anything together, even to accumulate knowledge. You got to have a context.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “A ton of prep. Let's do something. And so I went and talked to a chef and I said, hey man, this is what I'm thinking about. Like, I'm either going to ask you for a job, or this was after I was already working at the red line, and I mean, they're going to ask you for a job, or I'm thinking about culinary school. And he's like, well, here's the deal. You can come here today and you can ask me for a job. And I'll say, yeah, great. Here are the potatoes get peeling. Or you can go to culinary school, spend two more years of your life preparing, spending, you know, thirty, forty grand a year in bills to be there, then you can come to me and ask me for a job and I'll say, yeah, sure, here's a big pot of potatoes. Get peeling. Same thing. Up to you. Yeah, same, same. Like, okay, I'm pretty good at math. I got this. Where'd the potatoes? Let's do it.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “The pace, for sure. You know what was really important to me, Tim, is that it was on the job learning. And so before I actually got that first job, we got to Montana. I was like, okay, well, I guess I'm going to figure this out or am I going to take time off and then go to culinary school? And I was like, you know what, I've done a lot of school, right? And I'm kind of done with that.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Standing in front of Griardan, which means you work the grill. And standing between the grill and the line, I'd have the little pocket thermometer in my chef's coat pocket and read 130 degrees all night long. It was a real thing. It's really, really warm in some of these places. So you've got to deal with the heat. You have to deal with the stress, the pressure, and keep cool. And you have to be able to multitask. If you're like a myopic thinker, it's not for you. But if you can say, I'm doing this, I'm doing this. And meanwhile, you have all these little timers going off in your head. It probably means you don't sleep well all the time. That guy woke up three times last night just thinking about stuff. And it doesn't bother me. You know, it just is. So those would be the three things.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Right. I would look for someone who for sure can handle stress because everyone around you has the possibility to just totally lose it. And if they start freaking out, are you going to freak out with them? And then the whole ship sinks. So stress management is huge. This seems silly, but you got to be able to deal with the heat. Like the physical heat. Later, a few years later, or a year later, I had a different cooking job.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Timing, etc. Yeah, it's a real thing. It's tough. Yeah. And some people find it thrilling and do it really well. And some people find it thrilling and don't do it really well. And some people don't find it either. But if you have that, and I imagine some of you that are listening do, it's thrilling. And I loved it.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “That's a funny point in life when you don't really have the same stake in things as you do later in life. So it's great. Like, yeah, I'm going to open this thing up and you have a flat top, you know, like that flat griddle you cook on that's 20 feet long. Wow. And you're rocking eight waffle irons and you're cooking oven by the sheet pan in the back. And while you're doing that, you're stirring notes and getting the whole thing ready just to open up. Then you open that huge line by yourself and the orders start flooding in. And I think I'm a big believer that in the restaurant business, you either have the synapse or you don't. And it doesn't mean you're a good person or a bad person, but it does mean you either shouldn't be in the business or you shouldn't be in the business.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Whole hotel. And so we're really working on our super hippie mantra at that time, which meant no car, nothing automated, riding bikes, which was great in the summer, you know, and that's the big bait and switch with Montana, is that summer's eaten and winter is the opposite. So October came and the sun went away. You know, then you're on your bike at 4 a.m. and the snow and the bitter cold pedaling in to open up this huge hotel and cook breakfast for everybody. And it was thrilling. It remains one of my favorite jobs ever.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Which in nineteen ninety six was for sure the nicest restaurant in town and it was a motor and you park your car in front of your room, that kind of place. So I walked in and there is a master chef, which is a real designation. I think it means you can do all kinds of things, including put on a brunch for like 3,000 people and carve the hell out of a block of ice and turn into a swan or something. But that's a real thing. And I walked in and his name was Hans. And Hans said, oh, you want to learn to cook, huh? Okay, yeah, sure. Here, hold this. And he puts an eggpan in my hand, a little saute pan. I'm holding it. And he slaps a piece of toast in it. And he says, flip it. And I flip it. He says, great, you're the breakfast cook. For the whole hotel.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Exactly. Yep. Sign up. Here it is. Here's your life before you. It's an intense thought. So we moved there and I worked in all kinds of places, but the first place I worked and cooked was I walked into the red lion motor inn.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “So, just finishing grad school in 96, I'm 25. And I always think that I'm somewhat late to the party, you know. People decide I'm into food and wine when they're like 18, 17, 16. And you see those very young people into it today. And that's great. I'm always slow to make my decision. But when it's made, it happens. And so we moved. I just gotten married to my first wife. Not known as a bastion of grapefruit or wine, no offense if there are any Montanans out there. I've eaten very well there very frequently. But if you want to go learn about this stuff, it's probably not the best place to do it. But my first wife had gotten a tenure track job at the University of Montana. A what job? Tenure track. Oh, tenure track, yeah job at the University of Montana.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “She eventually made her way to the University of Arizona, and she did her PhD and then ended up as a researcher there at the U of A. My dad, a biomedical engineer at the university hospital there his whole life.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “So, my mom educator and she ran for a long time something called the teenage parent program, which gave kids an opportunity if you were pregnant, you could stay in school. They had a daycare facility in the school, and this is everything from sixth graders through high school. So when you can bring your kids to school, but two, you actually are in school and you graduate, and three, you learn how to take care of your kid at the same time. So she kept so many kids in school, which is huge. That's huge, huge.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “My mom, all over the eastern seaboard, but really settled in Syracuse, and my father in Syracuse. And his dad was a really rough dude. You know, street brawls, nickels in his fist and drugs, alcohol, all kinds of intense stuff. And so they're the people I'm most proud of to come from such intense circumstances like that, be the first of your families ever to go to college, and then make your way out west and actually make your way. I mean, they definitely changed relative to what came before them. So in a different way.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “You know, I has to have come from my parents, I think, but they switch gears To me, a much more impressive way. They both came from very, very tough places, complete poverty, very rough, particularly in my father's case, very nomadic in my mother's case and her large family.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “And the next day I was describing this experience to a friend, really good friend, best friend in life actually, Bobby Stucky, who was getting into food and wine himself. And I said, you know, Bobby, I don't want to go to law school and I don't want to do the science any longer. I want to do food wine. He's like, well, you should. I was like, well, then I will. And so I walked back to the firm. I was supposed to be in the legal library at that point on someone's billable hour, which wasn't happening. So I walked back to the firm and I quit. I did defend my thesis because it was that week. But I called law school and said, look, I'm not coming and hopped off the cliff and got into food and wine. And that was a big moment. Your parents, everyone has expectations for you. It's like, you know what? I'm just not doing that. It just doesn't feel good.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Thesis was great. I was ready to defend it, and I was supposed to go to law school six weeks later. So I walked out of the lab, I hopped over the fence and ran across what is Route sixty six there in Flagsaff to a small restaurant slash wine store. And I walked in and I didn't know anything about wine. I just know that I drank it on the daily in Italy and how much that meant to me. And I walked in and I bought totally based on sight. And I was like, oh, I kind of recognize that label. And I pull off the shelf and I took it home and I popped the cork and I poured a glass and that first smell, that first smell took me back to a moment that I had lived almost four years earlier when living in Italy, and I remembered a dinner I had had specifically at the Oseria Chingalibianco, which is on Borgo San Jacopo in Florence. I remember where I sat and where my companion sat and what she ate and what she wore and what I ate and what the waitress did right and wrong that night and all that just came rushing back from one smell.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Totally. That was when I was in LA. And then when I was in grad school and Flagstaff, I was clerking for a small environmental firm. And I found it didn't matter whether you were doing environmental or you're doing bankruptcy. It was the same board, like the monopoly board, making the same motions, you know, past park place every time. You just traded the hat for the shoe or whatever your piece was. It's still the same game. And I found I didn't like the game. And so I was really ripe for this moment. This is what Brockbat, Mrs. Pritchard in seventh grade, is that at the end of a very long day with that scan electron microscope, I was about to be thesis defense weekend. I was a couple days in advance of this moment. I walked out, I was just not feeling it.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Fluvial, that's the river part. And it wasn't so much about that topic at hand. It was about digging deep in the scientific method and what it means to be an investigator at that level. And that was great. I did find through that time that the farther you go with it, the smaller the scale at which you investigate. So I spent a lot of time in a small dark hot room with a scanning electron microscope, and this is when I'm in during the summers. I'm living in flax of Arizona, which is beautiful. I mean, right next to the Grand Canyon. It's amazing. I didn't see any of it, you know, because you're in the lab. That was happening simultaneously. I was clerking in a small firm there. I clerked for my senator on Capitol Hill, Dennis Deaconi, from Arizona. I clerked at Skadnarps, which is the world's largest law firm.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Awesome. That was great. Came back finished and I really wanted to do environmental law. That was really a thing. So I thought, well, if I'm not a marine biologist, I want to work to conserve this stuff. How do we do this well? I thought, well, I think one approach could be to speak the language of the scientific community, take that to law school, then speak the language of the legal community, and do your job well. So I went and did a graduate thesis in paleofluvial morphology, so ancient river system makeup is what that translates to.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Exactly. Totally. You know what? I'm just not doing that. And so geology was great, got me outside again, got me out of Los Angeles, which was awesome. I may have loved LA. I loved being there then. I like being there now. But, you know, I need to spend time outdoors. And if you're in the middle of Los Angeles as a student, it's kind of, you know, it's hard to do. So geology was the thing. And then I took a break from it, blew off my senior, I lived in Italy. All my friends thought it was a nut, but it was great.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “And so I found my way to the geology school, and it's definitely not rocks for jocks there. That's a funny thing that should be dispelled at some point. But it's great for Jocks.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Tried a lot of things. I went with the idea of doing marine biology specifically and the whole biology department was populated by young kids that didn't really have an interest in biology. They had an interest in going med school. And when you grade on the curve that means that intense things happen like your slides are broken and it's very cutthroat and backstabbing. It's like this is just anathema to everything that I believe in and how I want to live. So bailed on that and then had this wild hair that I should study econ and now it's just foolish because I was also boring. So they went to Polyci and ended up with a minor in Polyci. And that was interesting. That's kind of how the world turns and that was cool. But I needed to be outdoors. That's really my compass is being outdoors. I don't think I wore shoes until I was five.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “I got into wine because of my seventh grade German teacher, misses Pritchard, and she's a total bitch. And I didn't learn anything about German in seventh grade, but I did learn, and sometimes I'm slow to digest a lesson, but I definitely learned that you got to do what you love. So I walked in, I walked into class that day and first day of school, I was like, this lady's intense, and I don't like this subject. And I didn't go. And it didn't matter. And that I did know at that time that it just didn't matter. Like if I don't go to this class, the other class I never went to was typing, just not doing it. Just not doing it. I don't know if those student council hall passes that let you screw off like that 20-some years ago. But it felt great at the time, felt bad at the time. And I didn't understand a larger lesson, but it came back to me over time when I went to school, I went to accidental, and did my undergraduate work there and just struggled.”

    2015-10-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #110: The Tattooed Heretic of Wine and Whiskey, Richard Betts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT