A haunting new documentary about Anthony Bourdain

It was supposedly an email he wrote[0], but I can still sympathize with your point : my voice/dialect/vocabulary in person are different than the ones I use 'online', i'd hate for someone to make the assumption that I would ever speak 1:1 with the way I type to people.

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-bourdain-documentary...

(I say 'apparently' because whilst one use for it was confirmed as reading an email, the producer seems to be refusing to clarify where the other deepfaked audio is.)

It is weird, but they are using the AI generated voice to read actual emails, so they aren’t guessing what he might say.

Maybe I’m old-school but as a viewer I think I would prefer a narrator instead of a deepfake.

It’s a cool new spice on a crowded spice rack.

I'd read that as using normal audio out of context.

All documentaries lie. A lot, not just a little. Bourdain's shows were never an exact truth either.

It's a new interesting way to lie though, I guess it comes down to what were are ok being lied to about.

"We worked with four companies before settling on the best. We also had to figure out the best tone of Tony’s voice: His speaking voice versus his “narrator” voice, which itself changed dramatically of over the years. The narrator voice got very performative and sing-songy in the No Reservation years."

This can happen on purpose or by accident. It happens in documentaries all the time, with actors reading primary sources. But, the difference is that using a facsimile of Bourdain's voice makes it seem like a legitimate historical record, and not the creation of the director, which is what it is.

They aren't making up words though, they're "merely" having an AI read words we know he wrote. Is that ethical? I'm not sure. Neither is the filmmaker:

> Neville said. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”

I'm comfortable saying it's not disingenuous though.

In layman terms, it is where you "get your energy from". For introverts they spend energy when they have to interact with lots of people and be the "center of attention". But it doesn't mean they don't like it. Or that it's bad for them. It just means they have to go and be by themselves after to recuperate.

After all the only information about a person that we get is from what we see and hear. It's healthier to expect and notice that a celebrity is not the same when not performing.

One example where some people have difficulty realising that celebrities are not normal is when the celebrities play The Bad Guy and people encounter them in the street and get negative responses. Whereas if they usually played The Good Guy then any equally as false positive reactions could be attributed to their normal character.

Another example from last millennia which is similar would be fans of authors expecting their idols to be erudite dinner guests, founts of wisdom, or the swashbuckling hero of their work. The author would have to point out that their novel took 12 months to create and a further 6 months of editing and they were not the same person as the lead character and that they lived with their aunt and collected roses as a hobby.

I can't find the original source, but long ago in an interview Mike Myers (comedic actor, formerly of Saturday Night Live, and a string of over-the-top movies) described himself as a "situational extrovert". If you are aware of Mike's work, you might too be surprised to learn that he's an introvert.

A friend of mine used to live in a small town near another small town where one of the episodes of Ghost Hunters was filmed. That particular episode focused on an "old historic hotel built in the 1800's" and the frontier-era ghosts haunting it. It was a very compelling episode but I found out after watching it that the hotel had been built only a few years prior to the episode being filmed.

My personal opinion is that most of those shows are entirely scripted.

His death still worries me in a sense for my own life that I still want to do a ton with my life but I don't want to do quite everything. There needs to always be something to dream about, something needs to be left unfulfilled.

I can completely get for Bourdain that at the end there was no fix left. He had literally done everything in his life possible to do. What could he possibly dream about at the end? I am sure that is a much darker place then what it would seem on the surface. "Instead of killing myself, I can do anything so I should do X." He literally ran X dry.

There's something here to unpack about audiences (humanity even?) if this is what networks devolve into. Looking at you History Channel

You packed a lot of insight and wisdom into your comment.

Regarding secret suffering, I know someone who is so good at it that they make it easy to forget on a conscious level that they suffer from depression. It's insidious.

The past year or so has really illuminated the "it doesn't matter until it affects me personally mentality (or I don't understand it until it does)." Seems like that can be applied to depression. I posit lack of understanding about depression is exacerbated about our nascent understanding of how our minds even work. Combined this makes me think we, as a species, are not very educated about depression.

What do you think and/or what do you think we could do better so we don't continue to have an "absolute incomprehension, the continued downplaying of issues like depression"?

I've often used the phrase "trying to outrun the fire" to myself.

Maybe that's what happened to him, maybe not, but either way that blog post hit me in the feels.

I wonder if that's the impression that he crafted for TV. I read his book Kitchen Confidential, and the thing that struck me about his characterization of restaurant kitchens is that he always seemed to be surrounded by terrible people.

He portrayed that as universal, which is not my experience in them. Some are bad; others are not. And I notice that the common factor in all of his bad experiences in kitchens is him.

Restaurant kitchens are, indeed, hot, unpleasant, fast-moving, and potentially dangerous places. They pay very badly for incredibly demanding, exhausting work. It does attract a certain kind of adrenaline junkie.

But it also attracts a lot of kind, compassionate people who just want to make food that people enjoy. They're not all about taking cocaine and drinking and quitting on no notice.

I'm glad he presented a more thoughtful version of himself on his TV show. I didn't like the person he presented in his book. I would like to think that the former is more true to him than the latter. But I can say that his death didn't come as a surprise to me, based on what I read in his writings.

I don't mean that to be cruel. His work touched you and I'm glad for that.

AB always acted as a humble guest anywhere he traveled and with whomever he was speaking with. It was always refreshing.

I can't speak for Tony, but he fit the pattern of a highly intuitive person with sky-high expectations for himself. That's what made his journey so fascinating to me, anyway-- his constant pursuit of and personal and professional ideal that's always just out of reach.

“If I get hit by an ice cream truck and they’re peeling the bumper out of my head while I’m dying, I’m not going to wish that I had eaten more or traveled more or taken more drugs. I’m just going to regret how much I disappointed people in my life.”

I understand that suicide is hard on the people left behind, but I also understand that some people don’t want to continue to suffer to prevent others from suffering.

Suicide is a very hard step for people and although Futurama style suicide booths are a step way too far, there should be more humane avenues guided by medical professionals for people who are ‘done’.

Please if you do have suicidal thoughts, at least go to the doctor hand have a that about it, they can help you further.

If you watch some of his early shows, he was enchanted by the street food scene in Asia. But places like Bangkok and Shanghai cracked down hard on unlicensed street vendors over a decade ago, and the places that were lively environments in the mid-2000s have been gone for a long time.

Anecdotally, I tried to find street food in Shanghai and the only places were a few vendors next to the train station. I was told by the guide I hired that there really wasn’t much anymore and that western diets were all the rage among the under-40 crowd. In its place were sterile food courts with bright signs and cartoon mascots.

We see the beautiful end result of his work but I suspect much of it all was an endless grind he couldn’t get out from.

Didn't he have a wife?

the verb is the noun, no -er

You have it backwards. The verb cook was derived from the profession name