Ask Adam: Leftover rice syndrome

Why folks in East asia seem to eat out way more

often than their counterparts here in the west.

But first, on an arguably related topic, let us consider a real thing that is known as fried rice syndrome. "Ask Adam." First questioner: All right. So I've got a sciencey cooking question I've been wondering about for a while now, and it's about avoiding the danger zone when you're cooling down a large volume of material like in the fridge or something. There's all these different recommendations, but you hear things like, okay, you have a big pot of soup and you just stick it in the fridge. That's bad because somehow by cooling the outer parts, it insulates the inner parts and they stay in the danger zone for a longer time than compare to if you just left that soup outside at room temp and then put it in the fridge, and I'm kind of confused on that. But even apart from that, I've recently cooked some Indian food with one of my friends and I found out particularly with rice, she would cook the whole thing and then leave it on the stove, turn it off, and after it's done, leave it out overnight in room temperature with the rice, come back the next day and then heat it up and have it later, and it deepens the flavor.

But I'm thinking about reheated rice syndrome, I'm thinking about that danger zone overnight.

And she's like, "Well, no, no, no, we don't put it in the fridge because then it's going to go bad. It'll go off." And apparently it does. It starts to smell more if you put it directly in the fridge when it's still hot. Adam: Okay, I'm going to stop you there. So let's start with leftover rice syndrome. Okay, so leftover rice syndrome, that is 100% real. That is a real, real thing. Some of the other things we talked about there, not so real, and we'll swing back around to those.

But leftover rice syndrome, or it's also known as leftover rice poisoning, sometimes called fried rice syndrome or fried rice poisoning, that is 100% real, a documented thing. Nobody knows how widespread it is as is generally the case with relatively mild foodborne illnesses. People get sick from something that they eat all the time and they rarely report it to the authorities. Plus, you usually have no way of knowing which thing you ate made you sick because these infections, when they are infections, they have incubation periods. It's many hours or even days before you actually get sick. Therefore, it probably was not your most recent meal that made you sick. But sometimes the source of the infection is clear as day because a whole bunch of people ate the same thing and they all got sick and basically the same way around the same time. This is called an outbreak.

One such outbreak of leftover rice syndrome was documented in a Berlin kindergarten in the year 2007. And to understand this story, you have to understand that Germany is the home of kindergarten. That's why kindergarten is a German word. They go hard on kindergarten there and children typically attend for multiple years. In the US, we only go to kindergarten for one year. Any kind of school that you have before kindergarten, we call pre-K. And pre-K is not free or guaranteed to all children in the United States, which is one of the greatest shames of our country and one of the stupidest most self-defeating penny-wise and pound foolish public policies imaginable. Universal pre-K now.

Anyway. At this kindergarten in Berlin, they had 137 children ages two to six, because they go hard on kindergarten in Berlin. 137 children ages two to six, and they all ate the same rice pudding.

Rice pudding is a delicious dish that

Makes excellent use of leftover rice.

But this time it didn't turn out too well. Within 24 hours of eating the rice pudding, 31% of the kids who ate it suffered terrible vomiting and/or diarrhea as did 17% of the adults who ate it. Stuff like this always hits the kids way harder, kids and old people. So given the size of the outbreak and I'm sure given that it was little kids, the public health authorities in Germany got involved and were able to swoop in and gather some vomit samples.

Great work if you can get it. In one vomit sample, they found. Bacillus cereus. They don't know for sure if Bacillus cereus was the culprit here, but it really fits with all the other facts of the case, so they're pretty sure that was it because all the kids ate the same rice pudding. Rice is often contaminated with Bacillus cereus or it's endospores. Bacillus cereus is a common soil bacteria so it's easy to imagine how it could get into all kinds of produce. And apparently, it's in lots of starchy crops like rice in particular. But the thing that makes it so special is that it's a spore producing bacteria.

Not all bacteria do this. Bacterial endospores are not used for reproduction the way that ferns and fungus use their spores. A bacterial endospore is it's like a safe. Well, it's like a safe room, a safe room inside the bacteria's little house. Its little unicellular house. Endo means inside, right? So when the bacteria faces adverse conditions like being deprived of water inside a bin of rice that is being dried, those are adverse conditions for a bacteria, when that happens, they stash their genetic material inside a safe room and the rest of the organism effectively dies.

As is generally the case with all spores, these endospores are incredibly tough. They can survive all kinds of extreme conditions because they aren't really alive.

They're like the blueprints for life, not life itself. Cryptobiotic is I believe the term for it. The endospores of Bacillus cereus can even withstand a boiling pot of water. So you boil your rice, which has these endospores inside it potentially, and then you let the rice cool down. Once it cools down below 135 Fahrenheit, 57C, it enters the danger zone. That's the temperature range in which most bacteria are most active. And now, instead of being marooned in a desert of desiccated rice grains like they were before, these spores suddenly find themselves in a lush, wet, nutrient rich environment, your food. So it's time to come back to life.

The endospore effectively regenerates the original bacterium from whence it came. And then it gets to work, eating and reproducing and eating and reproducing. And in the process, it creates a toxin called cereulide. This toxin destroys mitochondria and it makes you throw up. So there are two different bad things that can happen in this scenario.

One is that you cook your contaminated

Rice and then you leave it around in the danger zone for way too long, the spores snap to life and live long enough to make enough of this cytotoxin, this cereulide.

They live long enough to make enough

Of that in the rice to make you sick when you eat it.

And then maybe you cook the rice again before you eat it, you reheat it, or you cook it with milk and sugar and spices to make rice pudding for a bunch of kindergartners, the bacteria die when they get cooked, but the toxin that they made while the rice was sitting around in the danger zone, that toxin is pretty heat resistant and acid resistant also apparently.

You eat the reheated rice or the rice pudding or the fried rice that you made with the leftover rice and then pretty fast within one to five hours, you just start puking your guts out. This is food poisoning going by the narrow medical definition of the term. Colloquially, we use food poisoning to describe like any foodborne illness, but scientists reserve that term for illnesses caused by the toxin that's already present in the food. The other scenario is you don't reheat the rice or you don't get it hot enough to kill all the bacteria and you end up ingesting a lot of live bacteria instead of, or in addition to, the toxins that they've already created inside the food. This results in a foodborne infection rather than food poisoning. After a somewhat longer incubation time, eight to 16 hours in the case of Bacillus cereus, you end up with other problems, more like diarrhea in this case because the bacteria are alive and your intestines making their toxins. In that outbreak in Berlin, everybody was fine, nobody had to go to the hospital, everybody felt better after a day. Think about how often you get some tummy troubles and you don't inform your doctor, let alone your local public health department.

This is why we don't really know how much foodborne illness is out there, particularly with the relatively mild ones. And this leftover rice syndrome from the case reports that I've been able to find is usually relatively mild. But I did find some mentions of fatal cases. All of them, the ones that I found were infants, babies. Little kids and old people — they're the ones you got to worry about most of the time with his stuff. It's also known as fried rice syndrome, of course, because fried rice is classically made with leftover rice. You let the rice sit around for a long time, spends a lot of time in the danger zone, the spores come back to life. And even if the bacteria die in the walk while you're making your fried rice, their toxins are pretty heat stable and one to five hours after you ate your lunch, you lose your lunch.

This whole thing about like the rice tasting bad when it's cooled in the refrigerator, I don't know. Maybe that's a thing. If it's a thing, it would maybe be caused by other foods that are in your refrigerator putting off strong odors and those odors being absorbed by their rice. That's the best theory that I can come up with. Your best defense against this fried rice syndrome or whatever you want to call it, your best defense is to eat your food right away of course and do not save it for leftovers, but I understand you might want to because fried rice is really good. If you are going to try to keep it safe for leftovers, the key is to get it out of the bacterial danger zone as fast as possible. Get it below 5C, 41 Fahrenheit as fast as possible so you get minimal microbial growth and metabolism that could make you sick later when you eat your leftovers. This claim that it's somehow more dangerous to cool your food in the fridge as opposed to on the counter, that claim is bunk, according to every food safety authority that you could think of.

Google, "Is it actually bad to cool food in the fridge?" And the NHS, the CDC, they all have pages saying, "No that's stupid. The fridge is fine" with a few important caveats. One, people tend to seal up their food before putting it in the fridge, right? For obvious reasons, right? For ones that we just mentioned, which is that when sort of stinky air circulates around food, especially food containing a lot of fat, that food tends to absorb those flavors. So you can end up with things in your fridge that taste like other things in your fridge. So we seal things up when we put them in the fridge. And in this case, sealing them up is bad. Sealing up the food, the hot food, that's going to slow the cooling process. Let your food steam out on the counter first.

Allowing the steam to escape has got to be the fastest way of cooling down really hot food in most common everyday circumstances.

Do not get in the way of that process.

Steam is lots of energy rapidly leaving your food. Once the food has finished steaming off, then sure, yeah, cover it up and put it in the fridge. It'll cool faster in the fridge than it will on your counter says basic thermodynamics. But that still doesn't mean it's going to cool down fast enough to be really safe. With really large quantities of food, things with lots of thermal mass and not a lot of surface area relative to their total mass, these big quantities of food, these can cool down really slowly even in the fridge. The fridge ultimately is just cooling stuff down with air, and air is just not the most thermally conductive medium available to you.

Water is. So I will sometimes cool stuff down in a water bath. You've seen me do this on the internet with stock. Stock is an incredibly nutrient rich, low acid environment, very hospitable to germs and it's one of these things that people do tend to make in ginormous quantities at home. So what you do is you take your bowl of the freshly made stock, you nest it inside an even bigger bowl that has cold water and ice in it and you just stir the stock around to bring more of it in contact with the bowl, which is where the actual heat transfer occurs. Metal bowls are way better for this than glass because metal bowls are generally more conductive. They do this kind of thing in restaurants all the time, because they're always dealing with huge quantities in restaurants and they therefore have the giant bowls and giant pots necessary to execute this procedure. If you don't, the one trick is to keep frozen bottles of water in the freezer and then drop those into the soup to cool it down.

Granted if the bottles are plastic, there is conceivably some risk of bad things in the plastic leaching into the soup if it's really hot. And if the bottles are glass, I suppose there's some risk of them shattering from thermal shock. One thing that I do sometimes is I will over reduce my stock and then I will cool it down by dropping in ice cubes, just naked ice cubes. The ice cubes add water, but I over reduced the stock so it all works out. Depending on the food, the easier option might be to just break your huge mass of hot food down into smaller quantities, thereby increasing their surface to mass ratio. Break it down into several smaller containers and put those in the fridge. Or in the case of rice, you can spread the rice out onto a wide surface and get it into a very thin layer where it's going to get lots of air exchange and it's going to cool off really fast, the way that they do it at sushi restaurants. Of course, that requires you to have a really wide clean surface on which to spread your rice, which you might not have at home.

Luckily, this is less of a problem at home because we usually aren't cooking giant portions of food to be reheated later, with the notable exception these days of like meal prep. Gym rat meal prep, which often involves rice, right? Your chicken and rice and broccoli. So if you're going to do that, one thing you want to be careful of is that you don't overwhelm your refrigerator. If you put in a huge amount of hot food into your refrigerator, even if you've broken it up into lots of individual small containers as you would do for meal prep, if you put too much hot food into your refrigerator at once, you might raise the temperature inside the fridge into the danger zone, and then all of your other food in there can start growing bacteria, which is not a great scenario.

But hey, coincidentally, refrigerators have thermometers. It's almost like they were designed with this possibility in mind. So check your thermometer. Good luck.

Sam: Hi Adam, I'm Sam. I'm from Hong Kong and I was wondering why eating out to sit down restaurants is filled so differently in the West compared to Asia. Here in Hong Kong, eating out every day is considered a common thing across all social status because there are sit down restaurants in all price ranges.

As far as I'm aware, the same

Phenomenon is true in other asian countries like japan, taiwan, and thailand, et cetera, as well.

In the West, as far as I

Know, this would be unheard of because doing so would break the bank.

Of course, there are takeout restaurants and fast food, but even eating as these places would not be a daily occurrence. Is there a reason why the eating out culture developed so differently between the two regions? Thanks. Adam: Eating out has become much more widespread in the US than you might imagine, Sam.

Indeed, it's become more widespread than many people in the US even seem to imagine, and I will get back to that. But nonetheless, I do think you've put your finger on a real thing. I expected to find some economics literature directly answering your specific question, and I didn't find any. I found some related bits of scholarship that informed the answer I'm about to give you. I imagine I mean, I have to imagine that there is an econ paper out there on this exact phenomenon and I'm just not finding it. If it really doesn't exist, then an econ graduate student in the audience should go and write that paper, like right now. I imagine there are such people in the audience. Econ is a great major.

I am not an economist, but I'm pretty sure that the hypothesis I'm about to lay out is roughly on target. Why do people in East Asia seem to eat outside the home more frequently than people in the West do? The ultimate explanation, I think, is the same ultimate explanation for basically everything else that is exceptional about East and Southeast Asia, and that is rice. Rice explains it all. It's the rice show today. Rice theme. Rice week on the Ragusea pod. You have probably seen the, it's called the Valeriepieris circle, the most famous meme map in the history of the internet. It was made in 2013 by a Redditor from the US with the name Ken Myers, Reddit name Ken Myers.

And then it was subsequently refined by an econ professor named Danny Quah, who was at London School of Economics at the time. Now he is at National University in Singapore. Dr. Quah's slightly more accurate version of the. Valeriepieris circle centers on the town of Mong Khet in Myanmar. So within an approximately 4,000 kilometer radius of that point in Myanmar lies more than half of the extent human beings. That circle loops around China and India and down around Indonesia and then up around the Philippines. And Quah's more accurate circle does not even include Japan.

I guess it's like a little corner of Japan, that very Southern most tip of Japan. Even without Japan, more humans live within that circle than outside of that circle. This is particularly mind blowing to those of us in the West who naturally have a Western centric view of the world. But the human world is objectively Eastern centric. That's where most of the humans are because rice. Rice is the ideal staple grain, or at least it was the ideal staple grain that was originally available on the Afro-Eurasian super continent. Corn maze is arguably even better, but only the Americas had that until the Columbian Exchange.

Rice yields way more food per acre

Or per unit of farmland than any other cereal crop.

Or at least it does when you grow it using wet field cultivation. Paddy fields, right? They had rice in Africa too, but not enough water for flooded field production except in a few places. Geography in general in Africa is not historically conducive to very high population densities, except for the. Nile and Niger river deltas and a few exceptions like that. East Asia is much more hospitable to large numbers of people living on top of each other in part because it is hospitable to rice. According to the US Department of Agriculture figures that I found, rice yields about 11 million calories per acre, whereas wheat yields just 4 million calories per acre. Corn yields 15 million calories per acre. But of course we're talking about modern cultivation in the United.

States in particular, and again, they didn't have corn in Afro-Eurasia until pretty recently, nor did they have potatoes. Potatoes also yield a ton of calories per acre and are surprisingly rich in micronutrients as well. But that's a topic for another day, a defense of white potatoes. In the olden days, you could feed far, far more people with rice than you could with any other crop if you used the flooded field systems invented in the ancient Chinese river valley civilizations where the geography is conducive to such things. The geography is also conducive to wet field rice cultivation in Korea and Japan and Southeast Asia and Austronesia, most notably the island of Java — very rich, volcanic soil around the. Pacific Ring of Fire, lots of warm, wet weather. You can get three rice crops a year down there out of a comparatively tiny postage stamp of land area. Other grains have their benefits, particularly like wheat and barley because they have gluten, which makes bread possible.

But those other grains have to be grown across a much wider area, which leads to much more dispersed populations and much more individualistic societies. Everything about wet field rice production leads to greater population density and greater interdependence. It takes a lot of people working together with a high degree of coordination to build the irrigation channels and to flood the fields at exactly the right time and then to drain them at exactly the right time and to bring in the harvest and plant the next crop. You need lots of people living very close to each other in order to pull this off. But the upside is, you'll produce more than enough food to feed all those people from a comparatively tiny splotch of land. So while the story of urbanization begins in Mesopotamia, it really takes off in East Asia. For the last, I think 4,000 years or so, the balance of the world's biggest cities has been teetering towards that Valeriepieris circle, the circle that encompasses most of Eastern and Southern Asia. There was a period when cities in the West got way bigger.

This is known as the rise of the West or the Great Divergence. It started around the 16th century and exploded in the 18th and 19th centuries with the Industrial Revolutions. The reasons for this are complex and debated and also rooted in geography as are the reasons why East Asia took a little longer to industrialize. But once it did, modern industry enabled populations in East Asia to explode at an astounding rate because they were already starting with a lot of people there to be begin with, because rice. They already had tons of people because rice and then they industrialized, and boom, population exploded. With population density and urbanization comes commerce and economies of scale. It is not efficient for every household to prepare all of its own meals every day. The only reason to do that is if your closest neighbors live one farm over, farming their wheat and barley that need a huge amount of space to grow.

It is not efficient for every household to prepare all of its meals every day.

And it's particularly inefficient in the era

Of industrial and post-industrial prosperity where households sizes are way smaller, because women, when they have economic and educational opportunity, they usually do not choose to have a million kids and extended families usually do not choose to live under one roof when they can afford not to.

When mom is cooking for a family

Of 12, there's some economy of scale to be realized there.

One cook, 12 portions. But when mom is cooking for a family of three and mom has her own factory job outside the home and can't be minding a pot of soup all day, the economics of cooking at home become much less favorable. Today, the smallest average household sizes in the world are found in Europe, North America and East Asia. According to the most recent United Nations reports on this topic, average household size in China is now three, two and a half in Japan and Korea, South Korea. Those numbers are comparable to the household sizes in the wealthy West.

And at the same time, population densities in East Asia are off the charts, particularly compared to the United States. In urban China and Japan and Korea and such, you have way, way more people living in much less space, and you have the same tiny households that we have. These are conditions highly conducive to centralized food preparation. One eating establishment can effectively feed a lot of people in these conditions. And furthermore, you have in East Asia, arguably, a more collectivist culture going back thousands of years to the highly coordinated labor required to pull off wet field rice cultivation. I will say that the old individualistic West versus the collectivistic east paradigm of thinking about the world, this is not uncontroversial. That used to be the widely accepted view in the West at least, but lots of people challenge it these days. There are deeply rooted individualistic and collectivistic traditions in both latitudinal polls of human civilization.

But personally, the notion that East Asia has a more collectivist mindset compared to the United States in particular, that seems roughly right to me, and would be the natural result of the differences in settlement patterns alone, right? Population density is just so low in the United States. And unsurprisingly, the prioritization of individual liberty, I'll say the fetishization of individual liberty in the United States, that is strongest in the rural and suburban parts of the United States or exurban parts of the. United States, which explains the contemporary political map of the US where most of the land area is filled with Republican voters. And most of the population centers, those are filled with democratic voters. And Democrats generally favor collective solutions to social problems. Urbanism itself is a kind of collectivism. People live close together so they can share things. They can share the same defensive walls to keep out marauders, right? That was probably the first reason to build a city.

And they can share the same transportation and sanitation systems and they can share the same giant pot of rice. East Asia has a bigger and deeper tradition of urbanization. Therefore, I think East Asia has a bigger and deeper tradition of sharing, and prepared food establishments are a form of sharing. Actually, I was reading one paper on this topic where the author said, "No, no, no, no, no. It is physically impossible to share food. Two people cannot eat the same food. It's not sharing. It is commensality," which is the act of eating together.

Each individual eating their own individual portions of food right next to each other. Fine, granted. It's commensality. But what commercial eating establishments allow people to share, if not the food itself, is the kitchen, the equipment and the labor necessary to prepare a million individual portions of food. Now is when all of the Marxists will come into the comment section saying that commerce is not actually a kind of sharing.

And granted, sure, you could look at

It that way.

I look at it that way sometimes, I am sympathetic to that worldview. But certainly, commerce results in economies of scale, which is why almost everybody does commerce, even in the ostensibly communist China.

Another thing about China is that fair labor standards are generally lower there than they are in the wealthy West, less so Hong Kong where you are Sam, but mainland, right? Fair labor standards, environmental standards, work safety standards, all generally lower in mainland China, right? Which is why it's far cheaper to make things in China, which is why everything is made in China.

Fresh food preparation is a very labor intensive business. And you might be able to do it a little more cheaply in places where you don't have to pay your employees as much or pass as many health and safety inspections and such. Maybe that's why eating out is so accessible in parts of East Asia. But that's pure speculation on my parts. I have no idea if food service workers in mainland China are treated any worse than they are in the United States. They're treated pretty horrendously here in the United States. But labor cost is certainly highly relevant to the cost of prepared food, particularly food prepared in a restaurant, which is specifically what you asked about Sam.

You mentioned sit down restaurants being far more popular in the east. And as we established in a recent video where we interviewed Dr. Rebecca Spang at Indiana University, she's a historian of restaurants, the term restaurants was originally popularized to describe a particular type of eating establishment where you sit down at your own table and you order what you want off a menu whenever you want to order it instead of at one time when dinner is served.

That is the opposite of street vendors or ins or pubs that served food family style usually at one time of the day. Sitting at a table whenever you want and ordering whatever you want off of a menu, this style of service was pioneered in modern Europe at least in the 18th century in Paris by establishments that served bone broth as the same kind of basic health scam that bone broth is again today. Supposedly restorative bouillon, that's where the word restaurant comes from restorative bouillon. The bone broth fad went away for a time, but the style of service remained and spread throughout the world with Western colonialism, which was enabled by the Great Divide, the rise of the West. The French and British and the Portuguese, they did bring restaurant style service to East Asia, that is true.

But it is also true that they had it in East Asia several centuries earlier. They had it and then seemed to lose it for a time. Restaurant style service is documented in. Song dynasty China starting in the 12th century when China reached an early peak of urbanism and cosmopolitanism, and that peak subsequently waned for several centuries. Anyway, sit down restaurants. Sit down restaurants are particularly labor intensive. You need waiters and stuff. So maybe cheaper labor in the east means cheaper restaurants.

Labor is definitely cheaper in parts of the urbanized east compared to the urbanized. West. But that's not really the case in Japan for example. Everybody eats out in Japan all the time despite labor being incredibly expensive in Japan. Everything is expensive in Japan, which is one reason everybody works so much in Japan. And the fact that everybody works so much in Japan is certainly one reason everybody eats out in Japan all the time. They have no time to cook.

They're all down around the office buildings

All day.

Got to eat somewhere.

Anyway, all of these trends are occurring here in the United States as well, which is why we are also eating out all the time. I'm not sure if we eat out as much as you do where you live in Hong. Kong, Sam, but we are eating outside the home more and more and more in the US. According to a 2018 report from the US Department of agriculture, the share of daily calories consumed outside the home here rose from around 17% around when I was born, around early '80s, that rose to 34% around the year 2010, which is the last data available. And I think we can reasonably extrapolate it's got to be above 40% right now. 40% of all calories in the United States are consumed outside the home. Most people here eat at least one meal outside the home every day.

It just might not necessarily be at a sit down restaurant. There are cheaper places where working class people eat out all the time like drive through fast food restaurants, sure, but also just like stores, convenience stores, Walmart, Dollar General. You buy a prepackaged shelf stable bag of chips or whatever and you eat it at work or in the car. I did a video some years ago asking what's the point of cooking anymore now that prepared food has become so cheap and so available, thanks to industrialization and commerce. And lots of people in the comments on that one accused me of expressing a socioeconomically elite view in that video. I think that I do express a socioeconomically elite point of view in most of my videos, but not really that one. Poor people are eating out more and more outside the home. Poor people and rural people.

This is one reason obesity and metabolic syndrome afflict poor people disproportionately. One of the greatest changes in the landscape of rural America that I've noticed over the course of my lifetime has been the rise of Dollar General. Get out of the cities, drive around where your food is actually grown, and you will see these little yellow Dollar General stores just freaking everywhere in. Rural America now. And what's inside the stores? Prepackaged ultra processed food that's cheaper than the fresh food you could prepare yourself, at least when you factor in the opportunity costs involved in taking the time to cook as opposed to doing something else with your time. Now that men and women work outside the home almost equally, the opportunity costs of being in the kitchen to boil a pot of beans for three hours, those costs are much higher. Cooking is becoming a luxury recreational pastime for the elite, hence my success on YouTube, making cooking content for a broadly elite demographic of people whom advertisers want to reach. I still find it to be a very fulfilling career.

I still think the things that I make help to make the world a better place. I think informational educational content is a massive net positive in this world. It is a happy coincidence that I can also make an excellent living by producing this kind of content because my sponsors want to reach you via me. Take for example, the sponsor of this episode, 80,000 Hours. 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that's all about helping you to find a career like mine, a career that helps you pay the bills, but is also good for the world. On average, your career is 80,000 hours of work. Do you just want to make money in those hours or do you want to do something that also makes the world a better place? 80,000 Hours is here to help you find a fulfilling career that pays your bills and does good. Go to their website and check out all of their research on different career paths, all their research on the biggest problems facing humanity today and how your career could help address some of those problems.

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Definitively why east asians eat out more than westerners do.

You could answer that question with actual science instead of just speculating for half an hour like I just did because I'm a monkey with a microphone and not an economist. A doctor of econ is also a degree that makes you very employable in the private sector should you choose to go there. It's a degree that can get you into the halls of power, where you could do some good if you are so inclined. 80,000 Hours also has a free eight week career planning course.

They have a terrific podcast, lots of resources, all free. 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit. Their only aim is to help you find a fulfilling high impact career. So do you and me both a favor, follow my link in the video description if you're watching this on YouTube or it's in the show notes, if you're listening to the pod. They will send you a free copy of their in depth career guide. Learn about what makes for a high impact career, get new ideas for paths you could take, make a plan based on what you've learned and put it into action. This will also sign you up for their twice monthly newsletter with high impact job opportunities, updates on their research, lots of good stuff. Go to 80000hours.org/ragusea to start planning a career that is meaningful, fulfilling, and helps solve one of the world's most pressing problems.

That's 80000hours.org. 80,000 is spelled or rendered numerically, right? So it's 80000hours.org/ragusea. Link is in the description or show notes. Thanks, 80,000 Hours. Wally Shedd: Hey Adam, this is Wally Shedd, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, probably a little older than your typical demographic based on things you said, which lends itself to me asking kind of a dad question. What's next for the burgeoning Ragusea empire? Maybe a cookbook? Although I've heard you kind of talk with disdain about cookbooks, but maybe that means you could bring something new to it. Or kind of the classic thing that we see with food channels is travel and food and maybe giving you ideas for future recipes or things? Just kind of curious as you seem to be looking to try out new things. Thanks.

Bye. Adam: Ah, check out ole Wally, kind, ole Mr. Shedd looking out for the boys' future. "What are you going to do with your life son?". Actually, it's very sweet, Wally. Thank you for asking and thanks for your interest. Yes, I have been approached by many publishers and editors and agents about doing a cookbook, especially since Joshua Weissman's book hit it so big. What is he? 26 years old? And he's a New York Times Bestseller.

He has really proven that it's possible for a YouTube cook to sell books to people other than their existing fan base. So yeah, there's a lot of interest in the industry now for people like me to do books, and I still don't really want to. First, because I don't think that my cookbook would be nearly as successful as Joshua's. I'm not Joshua Weissman. I am neither young nor cool, nor do I have like almost 7 million subscribers, though I did just pass 2 million subs and I would like to thank everybody for that.

That's a milestone that should not go unacknowledged.

I think I could write a book

That would sell okay, but there's really very little money to be made in a book that sells okay, especially compared to doing what i already do with most of my time, making videos, and to a much lesser extent, making pods.

This pays great and it occupies me constantly.

I still work way too much. I need to throttle it back. We were on vacation the other week and Lauren said to me, she said, "Look, you're 40 years old. You need to stop thinking about life as being a thing that you're getting ready for. Life is now. This is it." And of course my kids are only going to be kids once so. I really need to start working less, not more. To do a book, I would have to do a lot of work.

And it would be new work, right? New tasks that I'm not used to performing. New work takes way more mental energy than old work, the work that you're used to doing. And a book in traditional publishing would also require me to work with other humans in ways that I've gotten very comfortable avoiding. Unlike some of my peers on YouTube, I don't really collaborate with anyone, at least on the editorial side. I don't work with an editor or a researcher or a producer. I make my content entirely by myself. My only business associates are my wife and my agent, Colin West, Solaro Management. The best.

Colin sells all of the sponsorships and works with me on merch sales and such. Colin and Lauren are both invaluable to me, I sometimes feel like I am married to both of them. But the creative aspect of what I do is entirely my own and I wish it to stay that way. I'm not excited to bring a book editor and a publishing house into my creative process. And. I see little reason to do it, given how terrible the traditional publishing business has gotten. It's a real rough gig being in that business. I've seen it close up.

If I could write like a number one best selling cookbook like Joshua did, then I'd come out ahead on that deal and it'd all be worth it, but I just don't think that I could write a number one best selling cookbook. I think that I would be a mid list cookbook author, which is still a great gig if you can get it, especially compared to a real job, but I have a better gig, which is the one that I'm doing right now. The main reason that I do want to do a cookbook is fan service. I owe you everything. And many of you have said that you wish that you could access all of my written recipes in one place instead of having to copy and paste them out of my YouTube descriptions. I would like to give you what you want. I owe you. So I do see myself doing some kind of like self-published cookbook at some point, probably just digital, but maybe we could do like a little black and white print run or something.

The main reason I haven't done that yet is.

I would feel obligated to go back

Through all of those and edit the recipes pretty heavily, especially if i plan to charge any money for the product.

I know those written recipes are full of typos and errors because I hate writing down the recipes. So I do it as fast as possible because. I really hope that you don't actually follow the recipes. I hope that you just watch the videos to get ideas and then you go and you improvise your own recipes because I think that's a far more natural and pleasurable way to cook at home. But maybe that's me projecting my own way of working and my own way of learning on all of you who might learn and work in other equally valid ways. Anyway, Wally, I suppose all of this points to my broader answer to your question, which is that I hope my professional future involves less, not more.

I added the podcast because I really wanted to make it and I had sponsor interest for it. My hope is to eventually do fewer videos, which will leave more time for podcasting. Podcasting is way easier, at least making this kind of podcast, and it's much more portable. I absolutely do want to travel more Wally, and you can podcast really easily from any hotel room. I could absolutely see my channel morphing into a more travel focused channel. I had hoped to travel monthly for videos back when I first quit my day job. I guess that was a couple years ago now. But then of course Covid happened.

I feel reasonably safe to travel now, but the airline industry is in such shambles at the moment. And you can't be making arrangements to go and do a shoot in Istanbul or wherever and then reschedule all the people that you had made arrangements to talk to you at the last second because your flight was canceled for no good reason. And I can't be getting stranded in Istanbul because my flight home was canceled. I need to get back home to help take care of my young children who are the other reason I don't travel more, but you know, they won't be young forever. I'm playing more music lately. I bought drums. I have drums for the first time in my entire life. This was for me the main goal of growing up and getting a good job and getting a detached single family residents with a basement where I can have drums.

The drums were my ultimate goal all along, and now I've realized it. Having a blast in my little drum closet in the basement. But that's just for my own pleasure. I think my chance of making records has passed. Even if I was good at one point, I'm old now, and nobody cares about music by old guys. Old guys should not be making rock and roll, except for their own enjoyment. That is my position on that. I have no particular desire to grow the Adam Ragusea empire.

Mo money mo problems, a wise man once said, especially in media. The bigger you get in media, the bigger target you become, the bigger target for haters and harassment and threats and extortion. I've dealt with all of that.

And I can only imagine how much

Worse it would be if i graduated from micro celebrity status to actual celebrity status.

No, I probably don't want to be

On your tv show.

I will tell you this now only because it's the end of the show and I doubt that very many people are still listening. I got a DM from a casting agent asking me to be on an upcoming. Gordon Ramsey reality competition program.

And out of all the things that I could do with my career and my life right now, that may be literally dead last. I want nothing to do with any part of that. The gamification of cooking is everything I stand against. It's part of the broader problem of cooking becoming a douche expression of individual prowess rather than being an act of service or an act of self care. If I ever get involved with any actual cooking competition program, it will only be something that's really good natured and positive and sweet and low stakes, and Gordon Ramsey is none of those things. At least his TV persona is none of those things. He might be a lovely human in real life, but I was being asked to engage with his TV persona in particular. And to that I say emphatically, "Nope.".

Apart from the fact that I make too many videos per week, I really am living the dream right now. I'm doing exactly what I want to do. I have a very comfortable level of fame, enough fame to make me feel like I'm doing something and enough to help me make a great living, but not so much that it's like out of control. And I'm 40. I am halfway through life. And like most people, I hope that the second half of my life is quieter than the first. Part of me wants to go super hard and make a ton of money and invest it into a bunch of businesses so that I could be like a really positive force in the world so that I could give a ton of money away or engage in a lot of social entrepreneurship to support the things that I want to see in the world, but I'm just not that guy.

The most likely scenario for my future is that I'll keep doing what I'm doing.

Maybe I'll do some more music and travel related content, but I'll probably reduce my publishing schedule at some point pretty soon. And when my following reaches its inevitable peak and decline, hopefully I will have saved enough money that I can gradually gracefully bow out instead of embarrassing myself as I scratch and claw to stay at a party where I am no longer particularly welcome. I see you. I see the next generation of food video makers. I see them on YouTube. I see them on TikTok. They're going to kick my ass. They're going to outdo me just as I think I outdid some of the people who came before me.