Secrets to a Joyful Life with Ina Garten
October 1, 2024
Ina Garten:
Hi.
Amanda Doyle:
Hi, what a pleasure to meet you. I am Amanda.
Ina Garten:
Hi, Amanda.
Amanda Doyle:
So nice to see you.
Ina Garten:
I know Abby.
Abby Wambach:
Hi, Ina.
Ina Garten:
Let me just say, I can’t believe you remembered that incident. I will always remember it, but that you remembered, it was amazing to me. And, Glennon.
Glennon Doyle:
Let’s start there.
Ina Garten:
It’s so nice to meet you.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, thank you. It is such a delight and an honor to meet you. We’ve been so excited about today.
Ina Garten:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
We’ve been talking about this for six months, right?
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, yes. So here we are.
Ina Garten:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Today is the day that we are joined by Ina Garten.
Ina Garten has hosted her Emmy and James Beard award-winning show, Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network… I’m so smiley. Get your together, Glennon, on the Food Network since 2002, and recently launched a new interview focused series, Be My Guest, with the Food Network and Discovery Plus. She has published 13 cookbooks, including 11 number one New York Times bestsellers. In 2015, Ina Garten was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. She lives in East Hampton, New York with her husband, Jeffrey, who we love. Her new memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens is available today.
Ina, thank you so much for being here today.
Ina Garten:
It’s so much fun to see all of you. Where is everybody? You guys are in California?
Abby Wambach:
Yep, us too.
Ina Garten:
Amanda, where are you?
Amanda Doyle:
I am right now across the Long Island Sound from you.
Ina Garten:
Oh, you’re in Connecticut?
Amanda Doyle:
In Connecticut, yes.
Ina Garten:
Oh, great. Okay.
Amanda Doyle:
So I’m waving to you over the bend.
Ina Garten:
Well, I’m in New York, so I’m closer than you think.
Amanda Doyle:
Nice, nice.
Glennon Doyle:
We wanted to start, I need to tell you, Ina, that my wife is the most wonderful person in the world. Since she’s had such a beautiful, interesting life, she likes to tell stories about that beautiful, interesting life. So sometimes she tells the same stories over and over again and it’s just a thing we know and love in our family.
Ina Garten:
Don’t we all? I love those stories. I’m always teeing Jeffrey up, “Can you tell that story?”. He goes, “You know the story,” but I love to hear him tell it.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, she’s nicer than me.
Ina Garten:
You know what?
Glennon Doyle:
That’s so nice. I’m like, “Don’t tell it. We’ve already heard it.” Okay. That’s nice. I’m going to get some more Ina energy.
Abby Wambach:
Take some notes.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s the key to 60 years together right there.
Ina Garten:
Exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Noted already.
Ina Garten:
I’m sorry, I interrupted you.
Glennon Doyle:
No, you should have.
So recently, someone asked me, of all the stories that Abby retells with the most frequency, what is the story she tells with the most frequency? Ina, I didn’t even have to think about it. I said, it’s the story about Ina Garten and Taylor Swift and beer pong. So when we read, because honestly, you know how folklore happens and you hear stories over and over, you’re like not even sure they’re true?
Abby Wambach:
No pun intended.
Ina Garten:
I can tell you this happened.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you tell us story?
Ina Garten:
So I want to hear it from Abby’s point of view.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, great.
Ina Garten:
Because I know my point of view.
Abby Wambach:
So this is in 2015, the 1989 Taylor Swift tour was happening.
Ina Garten:
But that wasn’t the important thing. The important thing is that you just won.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, we had just won the World Cup and so we were kind of… Our whole team is in New York City to do Ticker-tape parade, and to celebrate, and do the car wash of all the news media outlets. So Taylor-
Ina Garten:
The car wash.
Abby Wambach:
That’s what we call it. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Never heard this?
Abby Wambach:
You just go-
Ina Garten:
No, we’ve never heard it.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, you just go from each station network to the next. Anyway, so Taylor invited our whole team to come to her concert to celebrate and to also come on stage and celebrate.
Ina Garten:
What did you think when that happened?
Abby Wambach:
That’s a good question. I don’t know. I was out of my mind, let’s just say that, in terms of just celebrating the World Cup and finally accomplishing the goal. Of course, to get the invite from Taylor. The thing that impressed me the most about Taylor was prior to the actual concert, the folks that were going to be going on stage all had to go backstage. She does a circle up with all of her dancers, and her band, and everybody, and she included our whole team in this circle. It was like a huddle.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow.
Amanda Doyle:
Of course she did.
Abby Wambach:
You wouldn’t believe the kind of leadership this woman was commanding. I was ready to go to battle. I was ready to go fight for any… It was incredible. She was incredible. The concert was incredible.
Ina Garten:
She was 25. I mean, how she had the presence, and the grace, and the humility, and the leadership at the same time is just… Let alone the talent, is always stunning to me.
Abby Wambach:
I know. She’s a huge idol in our house. One of the most beautiful things about this night is after the concert, she held this little party. I don’t really remember how this happened, but it was like all the tour buses were in circle.
Ina Garten:
It was huge. It was all the equipment was brought in 16 wheelers. They made an enormous circle around the parking lot. Inside the circle, she invited everybody that worked with her, and her friends, and people that were there to be part of a party. After she did her concert, she joined a party every night. It was just extraordinary. Anyway, and that’s where we were. We were in that circle. It was a huge circle around the parking lot.
Glennon Doyle:
You two, Ina had been connected how? Did you just win a World Cup also?
Ina Garten:
To Taylor?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Ina Garten:
It’s actually quite so sweet. Food Network Magazine, Maile Carpenter, who’s the editor-in-chief decided that she was going to have an issue that was rock stars and their favorite food network people. Taylor chose me. Which was just so… To be chosen by her is just, as you know, Abby, it’s just an incredible thing. She came and we did a photo shoot together. I just decided I didn’t want to just stand there with her. I wanted to do something with her and they could just get a picture of us having fun together.
I decided we would make a pavlova, which just reminds me of Taylor Swift. It’s this gorgeous meringue creation with whipped cream and fresh berries. I do it with berries and raspberry sauce, and we assembled the whole thing together. We had the most wonderful time and took two huge big serving spoons and just dove right into it. It was one of the great photo shoots I’ve ever had in my life. Of course, because you know how Taylor is, she’s just extraordinary. We ended up connecting. That’s how I connected with her originally.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Beautiful.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re being humble because they reached out to Taylor and said, “We want you in it? Who do you want?” She said, “I want Ina because Ina is my hero.”
Ina Garten:
I didn’t know that. Thank you.
Amanda Doyle:
So you are the hero of her. We’re going to circle back to this because I think it might be, the way we’re talking about Taylor, and her leadership, and the way she does things, and the fact that you’re her hero and you have always done things exactly your way, even though what everyone’s telling you that’s not the way to do it. I just think there’s a thread there.
Glennon Doyle:
But circling back to beer pong, where it all began.
Ina Garten:
Anyway, so here we are in the middle of all these trucks. What I remember, it was so loud. There was a band playing and there was music. I know there was some kind of music. It was really loud.
Abby Wambach:
So after the concert, my whole team, we kind of usher into this little barricade of 18 wheeler trucks and we’re just having fun. There’s ping pong tables and they’ve got solo cups to play beer pong. If you don’t know this, beer pong is a game. Their cups are put in a billiard form-like formation, and you have a ping pong ball and you’re supposed to throw the ping pong ball into a cup. If you get the ping pong ball into the cup, you have to drink the liquid in the cup.
So up you walk to the table. This is in my memory. So my team is there and you walk up. Ina, I am a lover of food and I love to cook. So Barefoot Contessa, you have been kind of a friend of mine for a long time prior to actually meeting.
Ina Garten:
Oh my God.
Abby Wambach:
The way that you present and cook food, and the way you talk about it, and just like your softness and your voice makes it so inviting to actually want to entertain the idea of even trying to cook. So I just want to lay that groundwork from my perspective.
Ina Garten:
Thank you.
Abby Wambach:
You have really enabled a real love of cooking in my life. So up Ina walks, up Barefoot Contessa walks, with shoes on. You kind of just came up very curious, “What are you all playing?” I just said, “Oh my gosh, we’re playing beer pong.” I think I invited you to play. Or somebody invited you to play. I’m like, “Let’s go.” I probably threw whoever was on the game, one of my teammates off. I’m like, you’re off, Ina’s in.
Ina Garten:
Voted off the island.
Abby Wambach:
Exactly.
Ina Garten:
Have somebody else here.
Glennon Doyle:
We got the A team right now.
Abby Wambach:
Exactly. You were drinking, I think, white wine in my memory.
Ina Garten:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
I was drinking beer. PS, I’m sober. I’ve been sober pretty much since then, I think. But you were trying to figure out how to play the game. So I was explaining the rules to you and probably doing a terrible job. So what did I say? You can quote me here.
Ina Garten:
So I’m going to tell you from my point of view. So obviously there was beer pong, there was all kinds of things going on. There was music and food, and everybody was having a great time. One of my friends said to me, who was with me said, “Let’s go pay beer pong.” I’m like, “I’ve never played beer pong in my life. I don’t even know what it is.” She said, “Oh, you’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.” Dragged me over there.
I’m standing there. I had a vague idea of how you’re supposed to do it. You came over and I’m like, “Oh my God.” You said to me, “I’m going to be your advisor.” I’m like, “Oh my God. Abby Wambach is my strategic advisor. This is so great.” I was out of my mind. I thought, “I’m going to nail it.” You said something, it was so loud, I couldn’t hear you. You screamed something and I was like, “What did you say?” You said, “Get the fucking ball in the fucking cup.” That’s your advice?
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Ina Garten:
I just love that. That’s all you need to know.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s not helpful actually.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my Gosh.
Ina Garten:
Does that sound right, Abby?
Abby Wambach:
It’s exactly right. Especially if it was loud. I just got to throw a few fucks in there.
Ina Garten:
That’s great. It may be the story I’ve told the most too, so I’m so glad you remembered it. I’m going to tell you this story and you’re not even know who I am.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, no, I remember it. It’s so good.
Ina Garten:
It was great.
Abby Wambach:
One of the other parts of the story that we’re kind of omitting here, but I think is really funny, is Taylor walks up to our table and she says, “Abby Wambach is playing beer pong with Ina Garten. This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” sort of thing. She was dumbfounded.
Ina Garten:
I don’t remember that. I actually remember, she must have been with her brother. I remember Austin being there and going, “Am I watching Abby Wambach and Ina Garten play beer pong?” The two of them were… Isn’t that crazy?
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like a fever dream.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, really.
Ina Garten:
It’s like one of those dreams where nothing makes sense.
Abby Wambach:
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Ina Garten:
Anyway, it was a great night. It was a great night.
Abby Wambach:
I agree.
Ina Garten:
It was really an extraordinary time.
Glennon Doyle:
It was the best.
Ina Garten:
It was really fun
Amanda Doyle:
Bringing so many cool things together. I love that story. When I got to that part of the book, I was like, “Oh, this is amazing. It’s true. Abby wasn’t lying.”
Glennon Doyle:
I think that’s how we all were. We were like, “Oh, I think this story’s actually true.”
Abby Wambach:
Yes. Yeah, I might embellish a story here and there.
Ina Garten:
I’m glad they trust you.
Abby Wambach:
But I’m not a liar. I’m not a liar.
Amanda Doyle:
I love it. I love it. Well, thank you for blessing us with that story. I want to ask you, so much of your book was just, it’s such a delight and it’s such an inspiring… It just makes you want to be greedy about life, just going after everything that is delicious in life.
Ina Garten:
Thank you.
Amanda Doyle:
It was just such an invitation to do that. You also have really, you’re really honest in the book about a lot of things that happened in your life that were not easy. You had a very relatable ritual with your dad where every day he would say, “What did you accomplish today?”
Ina Garten:
He did.
Amanda Doyle:
The interesting thing about that is that if you said something that also related to something you enjoy, he would say, “That doesn’t count.” It could only count as an accomplishment if you hated what you were doing.
Ina Garten:
It was what he thought I should be doing, not what I thought I should be doing. So if I won a tennis tournament and I knit a fisherman knit sweater, my father would go, “No, no, no, that’s not an accomplishment. That’s something you wanted to do.” But if I got an A in organic chemistry, that to him would be an accomplishment. I didn’t understand why what you love doing couldn’t be an accomplishment.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes. Okay. Because his idea accomplishment is like self-denial, struggle. Your whole life has seemed to be proof of the opposite, that you can have something, go after something you love and enjoy. In that pursuit, you have this mountain of accomplishments and build this empire. How did you adopt that opposite life philosophy?
Ina Garten:
I think that we all need one person who truly sees us and believes in us. That wasn’t my father. My father had a road map about what you should be doing with your life, and nobody could deviate from it if it wasn’t exactly what he thought was the right thing to do. It was all about appearances and accomplishments.
Then I met Jeffrey and Jeffrey saw who I am, knew what I love to do, and said to me, “Do what you love to do. If you love it, you’ll be really good at it.” The point is that if you love it, you’re going to do it a lot. I don’t have to force myself to go to work in the morning. I love to go to work in the morning. I can’t wait to go to work in the morning because I’m doing what I love to do.
Whereas as I was working in the government originally, I hated working in the government. Nothing ever happened. I was doing what my boss told me we should be doing, not what I thought we should be doing. I wasn’t risking anything. It was just a safe job, which to me was just boring. So I think that’s the difference. My father’s philosophy was rigid and for appearances, and Jeffrey’s philosophy was personal, do what you love.
He always encouraged me. “Just try it. Just try it and see how it works.” It’s not about a goal, it’s about enjoying the process and about figuring it out along the way.
Abby Wambach:
What a relief.
Ina Garten:
It’s what I always call jump in the pond, splash around, see what’s good. If you don’t like it, get out of the pond. But at least you’ve tried it. Then once you’re in the pond, you can go, “Oh, that’s really interesting over there. I think I’m going to try over there.” You move in that direction. Eventually you end up in a stream, which as a friend of mine says, the stream carries you along and you’re not knocking against the riverbanks. You’re in a stream that’s really where you belong.
Jeffrey really sent me in that direction, which I’m enormously grateful to him for.
Glennon Doyle:
When you try to make sense of your parents, which I don’t know if you do that, most of, I guess, civilization does. Do you think he denied himself throughout his life and that’s why he was trying to pass that down? Where do you think that came from?
Ina Garten:
I think it was a very 50s view of the world. I think it was Dr. Spock, that you did what the parents told you to do, that they set the rules and it wasn’t about the kids. It was about what you thought was appropriate. My mother didn’t connect, so she only had rigid rules about what she should do as a parent and what I should do as a child. There was no, “What would you like to do today? Or what would you like to have for dinner?” There was none of that. It was, she decided what I wore to school, what I studied, when I studied everything was very rigid.
So I don’t know really if my whole life has been a rejection of that or I would’ve done this anyway. I just had a false start with them. I don’t think they were bad people. I think they just felt that we should do, as kids, we should do what they wanted us to do and that that’s not how I work well. If Jeffrey wants me to do something, he says, “Whatever you do, don’t do that.” He knows I’ll go do it immediately.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, it’s his secret weapon.
Ina Garten:
It’s his secret weapon.
Amanda Doyle:
Definitely don’t make the Pavlova for me right now.
Ina Garten:
Definitely don’t do that.
Amanda Doyle:
So you’re figuring out as you go along, you are in this very responsible, very impressive, and for the time, quite progressive situation where you are a married woman living in DC working as an analyst for the nuclear energy budget.
Ina Garten:
It was for the Office of Management and Budget, which is the group in the White House that writes the budgets for all the agencies. I was working on nuclear energy budgets. How crazy is that?
Amanda Doyle:
NBD, Just a little nuclear energy budget, non-consequential.
Glennon Doyle:
A starter job.
Amanda Doyle:
A starter job, really. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
I was waitress.
Amanda Doyle:
Ford and Carter. It’s an entry. Get your foot in the door. So you’re 30 years old. You are-
Ina Garten:
I was 25, yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re 25.
Ina Garten:
Oh, when I was 30. When I was 30. Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
So when you’re 30, you and Jeffrey, great DC jobs. You have never been to cooking school, you have never been to the Hamptons, you don’t have experience in retail. You look on the back of the New York Times and there’s a tiny, little ad.
Ina Garten:
Tiny, tiny, little ad.
Amanda Doyle:
Tiny, little baby ad.
Ina Garten:
No reasonable person would answer.
Amanda Doyle:
It is advertising a 400 square foot specialty food store in West Hampton, New York, which is very far away from DC. Tell us what happens.
Ina Garten:
Well, I saw this ad for a business for sale, and I thought, God, that sounds like fun. They used to have businesses for sale in the New York Times where they would advertise, like dry cleaners in the Bronx. There was an ad for a frozen yogurt shop. Nobody had ever heard of frozen yogurt, that probably had no future at all. So I saw this ad for a specialty food store and I thought, “Well, that sounds like fun.”
So I went home and I said to Jeffrey, “I really need a new life. This government stuff is you. It’s not me.” He said, “Just pick something you love to do. Just pick something and don’t worry about whether you make money. Just choose something.” I said, “Well, I saw this ad for a business for sale, and I just think it’d be really fun to work in a especially food store.” He said, “Let’s go look at it.” I don’t know if he thought he was humoring me or if he just thought that’s what I should be doing.
So we drove up the next weekend. We looked at the store, it was tiny. There was nobody in it. It was a town that was basically closed for the winter. It was the beginning of April. There was nobody around. I walked in that store and they were baking chocolate chip cookies. I thought, okay, this is where I need to be. I have no idea why. We made a very low offer thinking, she’ll come back, we’ll negotiate. We drove back to Washington. I thought, we’ll think about this.
Then as you know, on Monday morning, she called me in my office and said, “Thank you very much. I accept your offer.” I just remember thinking, “Oh shit. I think I just bought a specialty food store.” I mean, it just happened like that. It was just crazy.
Glennon Doyle:
So what next?
Ina Garten:
Two months later, I found myself behind the counter of a store that I owned that I didn’t know anything about. I mean, I did it in a rational and slightly rational way. I made a deal with her that she stay with me for a month to teach me how to run the store, which I thought would at least give me some grounding.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s smart. Very smart.
Ina Garten:
I mean, part of me thought, how can I possibly leave this great job in Washington, all my friends, my husband, and just pick myself up and move to this place I’ve never been before to do a business I’ve never been in before? Part of me just went, I have a low threshold of boredom and I was done with my job. I thought, okay, I just have to jump off a cliff and I’ll figure it out. Little did I know that it’d be like the beginning of a path to where I am today talking to you.
Amanda Doyle:
I’m sitting here thinking, wow, your courage and willingness to trust your impulses and your desires is so huge to your entire trajectory. Also, the ability to live in a space where it’s like, don’t worry if you make money. Do you have any advice for people who are like, “God, I’m craving to go after what I want, but I’m not in the position to be able to be not having to worry about making money?” Or is there any room for building some of that want into our daily lives if we’re not able to choose something dramatic?
Ina Garten:
I think everybody has an idea about something that would be great to do, but we stand on the side of the pond going, “Oh, it’s too cold. There could be things in there I don’t know. There are all these unknowns.” We talk ourselves out of it. It could be as simple as a hobby. We just go, “Well…” I remember Jeffrey saying, “I’m 20 years old, 25 years old. I’m never going to learn how to… It’s too late to learn how to play the piano.” Which seemed too scary to him. Yet you’re not.
I mean, I think when you’re a kid, you do stuff that you think that you can fail at and learn. It’ll take time to learn. But as an adult, you don’t do that anymore. You don’t take chances because the failure is too scary. I think I was just incredibly bored and I’m amazed at, looking back now, at the courage I had to do what I had to do. Because what was in my head was what my mother always told me, “You think it’s a good idea, but it’ll turn out badly.” I had to overcome that message that I got over, and over, and over again to do something that was out of the norm. Yet I was able to do it. I just was incredibly compelled to find something I love doing.
Amanda Doyle:
This is what Cecily helped you identify, right?
Ina Garten:
Yes, exactly. That voice in my head was my mother’s, not mine. She taught me to replace it with my… But that was many years later. That was 10 years later, I realized that I had to replace that voice. That voice is never going to go away. That voice is always with me. But I always have to remind myself, no, that’s not your voice. Everything you’ve done, I tell myself, has turned out better than I could have imagined. My mother’s voice says it’s going to turn out badly. It doesn’t. I just have to reiterate that over and over again because we’re stuck with what was put in there when we were really small.
Glennon Doyle:
You still hear that voice in your head?
Ina Garten:
I do.
Glennon Doyle:
Then what do you do? Do you just say like, “Hi, Mom.”
Ina Garten:
No, I say something else beside my mom. You know what I do? It’s funny. I have this little, I think when I was about 13 or 14, my father said, “Nobody will ever love you.” I walk up Madison Avenue and somebody just leans in and says, “I love you.” It happens all the time, which is so lovely. I always say to myself, he was wrong. So I just have this kind of like, oh, wrong again. Oh, they were wrong. I just have this little cosmic joke with myself that they had a view of who I was that was just completely wrong, and I’ve replaced it with who I am. When something good happens, I always go, “Wrong.
Abby Wambach:
That’s so sweet.
Glennon Doyle:
I love that.
Abby Wambach:
Because it’s not based in bitterness, like your response to this doesn’t have any kind of bitterness coded into it. Because I could find myself, being in a family where I felt like I had to prove my worth and to try to win love, I can sometimes find myself getting into the bitterness track. So it’s so beautiful to just notice when they were wrong rather than associating it with any kind of, “I’m doing this in spite of you,” bitterness kind of thing. It’s really beautiful.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s freedom.
Ina Garten:
Thank you. I mean, I can go on a rant about my mother.
Glennon Doyle:
Sure. Who can’t?
Ina Garten:
Can’t we all?
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, you’re so unique in that.
Ina Garten:
I try and minimize it. Jeffrey always says if he wants to think about something while we’re having a conversation, he would always say, “So what would your mother think about that?” He knows I’m off to the races.
Amanda Doyle:
He’s buying himself some time.
Ina Garten:
Exactly. You’re right. It’s not bitter. It’s almost ironic.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Ina Garten:
There’s this wonderful quote that I talk about in the book that is attributed to George Lucas. “We’re all living in cages with a door wide open.” I think it’s so beautiful because we have the ability to get out of that cage, but a lot of us are afraid to because it’s what we know. I think my parents lived in cages and I just feel really good that I got out of that cage.
Glennon Doyle:
I just want to flag, as an excellent psychological activity, Jeffrey’s question. If you’re trying to make a big decision, it’s probably a good idea to ask yourself, “Okay, what would my mother or my father or whoever voices you’re trying to escape, think of this?” Then you can get that out. Then you can ask yourself, “What do I think of this?”
Abby Wambach:
That’s really good.
Glennon Doyle:
Because sometimes the voice feels like what you think.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
But if you can get it out as, this is what she would say, then you can be free to then bring yourself. Right?
Abby Wambach:
Oh, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
I love it.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s cool. Very cool.
Amanda Doyle:
So your dad thinks you’re never be loved, and here you are 60 years later, still with Jeffrey, 60 years. This is a love story for the ages. The internet loves y’all. You are like hashtag, what are they? Hashtag couple goals. This is everywhere. I have loved y’all for a long time. After reading your book, I love you even more because you were so brave to talk about your separation and your separation gave me… It made it so deep and real, and it made me respect you so much because during a time when I don’t think women were doing that a lot, and even now, you took time away because you needed proof that things would be different. You needed something to hold onto. What was it and how you know, what did you need?
Ina Garten:
Well, I think I went from my parents’ house to Jeffrey’s house at a time when women were wives. We had roles, men had roles, women had roles, and we were expected to follow them. Of course, Jeffrey, being of the time, expected that too. I just always fought against that kind of cage. It’s funny, it was scary at the time when I said I just needed time on my own. But when I look back now, I think it’s even scarier because when I think about what I could have missed, if that hadn’t turned out well, it’s frightening to me.
But he was so kind and he said, “If you feel like you need to be on your own, you need to be on your own.” He even supported that, which made me think, am I crazy? But we figured it out. We figured it out, and we came back together, changed, both of us. I think the rest of our life would’ve been very different if I hadn’t done it. I think we’re both happier.
Amanda Doyle:
Isn’t it true, though, that you could have missed the other way too? If you hadn’t been brave enough to challenge it, you might not have the relationship with Jeffrey that you have now.
Ina Garten:
No, I wouldn’t.
Amanda Doyle:
You wouldn’t.
Ina Garten:
I was changed by it and he was changed by it, so I would not have had the relationship. It’s like a little piece of sand in an oyster. If something’s bothering you, you don’t fix it. It just gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger. It just damages the relationship. It comes out in different ways. I think we were very honest with each other and we figured it out, which is wonderful.
Glennon Doyle:
What do you feel like you figured out?
Ina Garten:
I figured out who we were. I mean, Jeffrey said to me that, he was in the State Department. He worked for the Secretary of State doing policy work and writing issue papers. He felt that because he was the husband that he didn’t have the freedom to travel as much as he wanted to with the State Department. He figured out that. I said to him, “No, you need to do what you want to do. Just because we’re husband and wife doesn’t mean you can’t do whatever you want to do. We’ll figure it out.”
I mean, there were years when he lived in Tokyo and we figured it out. We went back and forth between Tokyo and East Hampton, as unlikely as that sounds, but we figured it out. He just has this view of the world that each of us has to decide what we want to do and we have to figure out how to do both of them. It’s not like we do what you want to do or we do what I want to do. We have to do both things and we’ll just work out the details. I think we got out of traditional roles that we were supposed to play. It’s really satisfying.
Amanda Doyle:
Satisfying. This is something we’ve talked about. Another thing your dad used to say is, “You’ll never be satisfied.” I wrote to you about this because that’s the last thing my ex-husband said when he walked out the door was, “You’ll never be satisfied.” I mean, if you look at someone who gives up a really, really good DC job to buy a little shop a lot of states away, or who risks a really good marriage to take a separation, one of you is that someone who will never be satisfied. What do you make of that-
Ina Garten:
What a good question.
Amanda Doyle:
… Casting women as unsatisfiable?
Ina Garten:
I think what my father was talking about, and maybe your ex-husband, is we didn’t want what they wanted us to have. It wasn’t that I wasn’t satisfied with things, I wasn’t satisfied with what they wanted.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Ina Garten:
I’m always satisfied with doing what I want to do. I think that may have changed. Now I don’t know. I don’t know about other people’s relationships, but I think that’s what they were talking about. Does that sound right to you, Amanda?
Amanda Doyle:
It does. It’s you won’t settle for what I’m offering is what you will never be satisfied.
Ina Garten:
Exactly. How about we have bigger ideas than you do?
Glennon Doyle:
That’s so true.
Ina Garten:
We want to use our creativity, and our ambition, and our drive to do what we want to do, not what a guy wants us to do, or anybody. It doesn’t matter who it is. We want to do what we want to do and we’ve created the structure so that we can do that. That’s what’s satisfying. It’s to challenge ourselves.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it almost makes you understand a little bit. I feel like we were all raised, we were all little girls who maybe our parents sensed in us a biggerness than what they thought was available to us in the world. If you’re raising a little Ina and you are a rigid person who’s looking at the world and thinks there’s only a handful of things available to your daughter, and you sense in her a bigness, and a desire, and a big life force, you might spend all of your time telling her, “You will never be loved if you stay like this. You’ll never be satisfied if you stay like this. You can’t do what you want. You have to do what…” It’s almost understandable when you’re sensing a big spirit inside a structure that is very limited for her.
Abby Wambach:
It’s really helpful.
Ina Garten:
That’s really smart because I never saw it that way, but I think you’re absolutely right.
Abby Wambach:
Me too.
Ina Garten:
I always thought I tamped it down. But you’re right. It’s, “You’ll never be loved if you continue to try and do too much.” Yeah, that’s really smart.
Abby Wambach:
I know, that was kind of healing for me also. Like, yeah, that’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s fear. It’s scared. Parents with a big energy girl would be like, “Oh, shit.”
Ina Garten:
Also remember, I mean in all fairness, we were really, I certainly was a transitional generation. I was in the beginning of, I mean, Gloria Steinem was writing one, you know, Ms. Magazine came out when I was that age. There were movies then like Jill Clayburgh as An Unmarried Woman. Is that what the name of the movie was?
Glennon Doyle:
I think so.
Ina Garten:
So women were really trying to break out of the mold at the time. But most people still lived in the 50s and that was their world. They thought, “If my brother was brought up to be a doctor and I was brought up to be a wife, even though I had to have a great education, I had to do all the same things. But at the end of the day, their goal was that I’d be a wife.” That’s not a goal. I mean, it’s nice to be married to somebody you love, but it’s not a goal.
Amanda Doyle:
Have you always known what you want? It seems like all of this beautiful thing that you’re able to build is based on this very underrated skill of clarity, of knowing what you want because you’re like, “I want to go for what I want.” But what do you think it takes to know what you want? Because I think if you ask a lot of women, “What do you want?” That would be a baffling question.
Ina Garten:
I think that’s a really important question. The answer varies. I mean, I remember somebody, a therapist saying to me, “What do you think would be fun?” I didn’t have any, I wasn’t having enough fun. I remember saying to her very clearly, “A convertible.” I mean, here I am, I think 40 years later, I still have a convertible. So I could identify those things very clearly. But other things, when I sold Barefoot Contessa and set up an office for myself, having no idea what I was going to do next, and actually thinking it might be that my best career was behind me, I thought maybe I would never figure out what to do next.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re 51 at this time?
Ina Garten:
I was 50, 51. 50, 51,
Amanda Doyle:
Okay.
Ina Garten:
Then I didn’t know what to do. Jeffrey said to me, “You love the food business. Just do it a different way.” I thought, well, people had asked me to do a cookbook. I didn’t think it would be interesting, but I thought, “Well, at least it’d be something to do and I’ll do that while I figure out what to do next.”
But one of the things that I do is if I’m doing something, I tend to swing for the fences. So I got a proposal accepted. I thought, “Well, let me just see if I can do this as well as I can do it.” I hired my own publicist, I hired my own photographer. I just hired people myself so that I could make the decisions. I didn’t have a publishing company telling me how to write a book or telling me how to photograph it. I just wanted to do it my way. It was a very expensive decision, but Jeffrey was totally behind it and it worked out really well.
So I didn’t think I knew what I wanted to do next. I just started doing something and tried to figure out how I could make it enjoyable and fun. So that’s more of a process, and it’s everything in between. You don’t always know exactly what it is, but just start. Just start doing something that would be interesting, and that will lead to something else that’s interesting, and that leads to something else.
But when I look back, as I said, I’m amazed how brave I was about doing something that I had no idea whether I could do it or whether it would be interesting. But it just kind of tweaked my interest. I like solving problems. So having something very difficult, as you all know, we can do hard things. Those are the things that are really satisfying that make your life, it’s not the easy things.
Amanda Doyle:
One of the hard things you had to do throughout this and that you had such clarity with with all of your projects. You were heading into unknown territory. You’d never done a cookbook at 50, you had not made a TV show. You’re going into these new industries and the people are telling you, “We’re the experts. This is what we do for a living. You do it this way.” Over and over, they’re telling you. The book, they designed the book for you. They said, “No, this is the way to do it.” It didn’t feel right. The same way they wanted to do the TV show. It didn’t feel right and you kept pushing against it. They said, “It’s going to be a disaster.” Not so much. Turned out to be pretty good.
Ina Garten:
It turned out okay.
Amanda Doyle:
Tell us about that because that is scary. When you don’t know anything about an industry other than knowing yourself, how do you navigate that?
Ina Garten:
I have to tell you, I don’t know where it comes from. When I started writing a cookbook, having never written one, and I always think if I had gone to the bookstore and seen how many cookbooks there are, I would’ve thought, you’re out of your mind. But I just wanted to write the cookbook that I wanted to write. Maybe it’s from my childhood, maybe I was always this way. Nature versus nurture. Who knows? I just hate somebody telling me what to do. I absolutely hate it.
So when I started the process, I thought, “I’m going to write a cookbook, but I’m going to write the cookbook I want to write, and I don’t want anybody telling me how to do it.” So I did it on my own terms. When somebody tried to tell me something, it’s not that I would say, “No, I’m not doing it.” My editor wanted the design to look like a certain thing, and I said, “Look, it’s not about whether you win or I win. Let’s find a design where we’re both happy.”
He just refused to let go control of it. So I found somebody who said to him, “Just get out of her way. Let her do it.” My second editor, after I worked with her for a year, I said to her, “I wasn’t so difficult to work with was I?” I’m sure my first editor thought it was just impossible. She said, “You were absolutely great. The one thing I needed to know is when your obsessions kick in, just get out of the way.” I love that about her. So I mean, she got it. She got that I needed to make my own decisions.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re talking about negotiating with your editor, but if there’s a way for you to get what you want and me to get what I want, you are a ridiculous business woman. I mean, this is something that everyone loves you as a human, as a voice, as a cook. I’m obsessed with you as a business woman. I feel like part of your clarity of knowing what you want hones your ability to know what other people want, which makes you negotiating magic.
You were able to figure out things and settle lawsuits and cases that entire law firms of people couldn’t see their way through because you’re able to see a way through. Can you please, for the love of God, teach us your magic of how do you… Because this is a revolutionary kind of, I would venture to say, a woman centered way of I can figure out how to win without you losing.
Ina Garten:
I have to give my father a lot of credit in this. When I was a kid, the only thing that we would talk about is he liked to do real estate deals and my mother hated it. So he would call me into a study and say, “Talk this deal through with me.” I think it came from him. I don’t think I made this up, but I really believe it, is when you’re negotiating with somebody, figure out first what they want. Figure out how to get what you want and what they want at the same time. So everybody walks away feeling like they won. It’s so often not about money, it’s about something else entirely. But in business deals, it’s very successful.
Amanda Doyle:
How do you practically do that? Because you’ve gotten people to sell you things that were absolutely 100% not for sale.
Ina Garten:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
How do you actually… Do you say to the person, “What do you need? What do you want?” Or do you just put yourself in their shoes and imagine it? Or do you develop a relationship and find out that way? How do you know what they want and need?
Glennon Doyle:
Tell us a story about that.
Ina Garten:
I’m thinking about two different deals that I did. One where the seller told me what he wanted. He wanted to sell the property in five years and I needed to buy it today. I needed to build a barn there where I could work. So I knew what he needed and I knew what I needed, and I figured out three options for him so he could choose whichever worked best for him. That worked. I just was kind of hunting around, while we were talking, I was hunting around for what would appeal to him. It turned out that he said one of my options was, “I buy it from you today for 10% more than the value of the property.” He said, “Actually, that works for me.” So we did that. So I got him what he needed. He got me what I needed, and everybody walked away feeling like they’d won, which is the way I want negotiations to be.
I don’t want people feeling like they got used, or they got a raw deal, or they got manipulated into something. I want people to feel good about it. There was another where I was buying a building and the man was asking for a lot of money. He was a real estate investor. So my idea is that he wanted to feel like he’d made a good investment when he bought it three years before, and then he made a lot of money on it. I didn’t have any money at all. I didn’t know how I was going to buy this building. I made him a deal where I said yes to his price, but I would pay him in five years and that he would give me a mortgage for the five years until I could go to the bank, and borrow the money, and pay him off. So he got what he wanted, which is that he could tell his friends, “I sold this building for so much money,” and I got what I wanted, which is I could buy a building with no money. It worked out great.
So I mean, you have to be creative about how you talk to somebody, find out what they’re interested in, what’s important to them, and then figure out what you want. There’s very often a solution. A realtor once said to me, “Make an offer. Make a low offer. It doesn’t matter. If you don’t have the money to buy something, make a low offer. What are they going to do? Call the police?” It was such a great thing to remember. Every once in a while, I make a low offer on something that I either don’t think is worth what they’re asking or I don’t have the money for it. Every once in a while it works. They say yes because they just want to sell the property.
Amanda Doyle:
Cool.
Abby Wambach:
I think long-term too, I firmly believe in that kind of way of negotiating where if everybody feels like they’re walking away a little bit of a winner, that is universally like you’re sending out into the universe, that kind of energy. So that’s the energy that’s going to keep coming back to you. It’s this karmic force. I believe this is partly why more women need to be in leadership positions because-
Ina Garten:
100%.
Abby Wambach:
The more we have women having this kind of mentality, the more peace we will bring, the more unity we can bring to a very divided situation we might find ourselves in. So I just love it, and I’m going to start doing this. We’re going to start doing this.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s the opposite of how I do things.
Abby Wambach:
I know.
Glennon Doyle:
Hey.
Abby Wambach:
I love you.
Ina Garten:
How does it change how you do things? What was the negotiation that didn’t work out that you think might’ve been different?
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, shoot. I don’t know, but, I don’t know about an example right now, but I think I tend to go into any negotiation or argument with a very defensive, fearful-
Ina Garten:
Oh, that’s very interesting,
Glennon Doyle:
… Protective, it feels like a zero-sum game and this is-
Amanda Doyle:
I’m afraid I’m going to get screwed.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, this is changing for me now. I can feel myself going into that energy more. But I think it’s about the voices in my head too, that are not mine. But I’m just starting to figure that out.
Ina Garten:
If we go into a negotiation and we’re a little insecure, we feel that we’re going to end up being worn down from the person we’re negotiating with. Very often you don’t want to be. I think the best deals that I’ve made are the ones where I don’t really care if it comes out fine. If it doesn’t come out, it’s fine too.
Glennon Doyle:
That a key.
Abby Wambach:
That’s your energy right there.
Glennon Doyle:
That is a key, is not feeling like it is life or death, or that your identity, or your whatever is tied up into it. The best situations I’ve been in recently are ones where I’m like, this would be great if it works and if it doesn’t work, there’s great stuff about that too. That’s sort of a very powerful position, I think.
Ina Garten:
How many times have you negotiated to buy an apartment or a house or something like that, and you didn’t get it, and then when you did get something you thought, “Oh, thank God that deal didn’t happen.” So I always feel if a deal falls through, I always think, okay, I’m going to find out what’s next and it’s going to be better, and I’m going to be really grateful that it fell through.
Glennon Doyle:
I come from evangelical Christianity and our dogma is basically if it rhymes, it’s true. So we always said rejection is God’s protection.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, gosh.
Glennon Doyle:
That one-
Abby Wambach:
Might be true.
Glennon Doyle:
… I think is often true. I heard a rock star say it recently as, “No just means new opportunities,” which doesn’t rhyme, so that’s probably not true and Jesus would not approve. But that has played out as very true in my life.
Amanda Doyle:
I spent so much time thinking about your book. You go from this rigidity where your mom thought that food was strictly for sustenance. It’s kind of like your dad’s, “You can’t enjoy things that are achievements.” If there was any kind of joy associated with food, it almost negated the nutrition. It cannot be both. It’s just that one thing. Then you came to food with this idea of you’re expressing love through it. But also what I think is so freaking cool, and I’ve been thinking about this from my life perspective, is that your recipes are not about… They’re about the food, but they’re really about the party.
Ina Garten:
They’re about the people.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes. Because if you can make something impressive, you can spend all your energy and be totally stressed out to have something impressive, but then when you present the thing that’s impressive, you have nothing left of you to give, which I feel like is the way I’ve lived my life. I’m trying so hard to be impressive and present a dish that’s beautiful that I have missed out on the opportunity to connect with my company and actually be at the party. Tell us about, I feel like your whole life and all of your food, is that. Just how do we be at the party better?
Ina Garten:
What I did when I wrote Barefoot Contessa parties was talk about what works and what doesn’t work. I mean, I just love to do dinner parties. I love to invite people over. I love that connection and I love to cook for people. I love to cook for people I love, I should say.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Ina Garten:
I started to look at what I do and why I do it, and I realized that you can make a perfectly delicious meal that everybody will appreciate, and feel taken care of, and nourished, and connected with, and the more low-key the meal is, and the less exhausted you are, the better the party is because people just subliminally feel uncomfortable if they feel like you’ve worked yourself to the bone.
As Nora Ephron once wrote, I’m just paraphrasing, if you answer the door, and you’re like exhausted, and your hair’s on fire, people feel terrible. They don’t want to feel like you’ve given everything to make dinner for them. They want to feel like it’s a good restaurant. Greeted at the door, you’re happy to see them, “Have a drink. Let’s sit down. Let’s talk.” Not like, “I can’t talk to you now. I have something in the oven.” I realized the parties that were the best where everything’s made in advance or served at room temperature, it’s simple, it’s delicious, and you’re happy to be with the people that you love, and that’s really it.
The master of this was a cookbook writer, Lee Bailey, who lived in Bridgehampton and had a wonderful store called Bailey-Huebner at the old Henri Bendel. He would sit with his guests in the living room having a lovely time, having a drink, having little tomatoes if they were in season, very simple hors d’oeuvres. Then everybody would move to the kitchen and he would make dinner while they were in the kitchen, the finishing touches and it was Southern. It was simple. It was fun, and everybody just loved being there.
So I realized the Julia Child’s makes something that takes four days for dinner, it’s really actually counterproductive, so why do it anymore? Let’s do something simple, make a roast chicken. People are just delighted to have something delicious and to sit around small round… I like small parties, small round table with six people and just have a wonderful time.
Abby Wambach:
It’s so true. Even in our house, even when I’m cooking dinner, and sometimes when I’m trying to time it correctly-
Ina Garten:
It’s hard.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. I can be very particular with time, and then I can get a little bit triggered and a little bit short. So this one-
Glennon Doyle:
Chippy. We call it Chippy. It’s getting chippy in there.
Abby Wambach:
So Glennon will start to just make herself busy so she doesn’t feel bad. So she starts to unload the dishwasher or fill the dishwasher, set the table-
Glennon Doyle:
Or just walk around looking annoyed. I found that that works.
Amanda Doyle:
Just picking up things and putting them down.
Glennon Doyle:
If I just look upset, that’s helpful, I think.
Ina Garten:
I mean, I do this professionally and Jeffrey knows if he starts talking to me 15 minutes before people get there, I’m like, “Don’t talk to me.”
Amanda Doyle:
That’s comforting.
Ina Garten:
So he knows to get out the way. Yeah. You know what? Cooking’s stressful. I’ve been doing it my whole life. I’ve been in the food business. I’ve written cookbooks. It’s still stressful because you order a chicken, you want a four pound chicken, and what you get is a two and a half pound chicken. All of a sudden the whole thing is… The timing is off. The quantities are off, everything. Or the carrots taste different in August than they do in January. You have to make adjustments along the way. So it’s hard. I really appreciate how hard it is.
Amanda Doyle:
I just feel like it’s such a beautiful way because when you’re talking about the dinner party, I’m thinking about my parenting and my relationships, because it’s like the proof of love is not in evidencing your self-sacrifice.
Ina Garten:
That’s interesting.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s in the shared experience.
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Amanda Doyle:
When you front and center your sacrifice trying to show that that’s your love, it just makes people feel bad. But when you sit down calmly with them-
Ina Garten:
They just love you.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Ina Garten:
They just love you. That’s it. Yeah. We’ve all had bad dinner parties and we’ve all learned from them. You know what? It’s not the end of the world. You just kind of get up, you brush yourself off, and you do it again, and you learn from it.
Glennon Doyle:
But it’s kind of the end of the world if you run your entire life like a bad dinner party. It’s the end of the world. If you martyr yourself and in an attempt to impress, you lose yourself, and you present to the world nothing but a harried martyr, thinking that that is going to earn you love, and it never does. That is kind of the end of the world, right? Just to bring it down. To bring a joyful conversation down.
Abby Wambach:
It’s the end of the world if you realize it. It’ll be the end of that way of the world.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. You begin again.
Abby Wambach:
You begin again, like Ina just said, you just dust yourself off and you can start anew.
Glennon Doyle:
I know we have to end. I can’t stop thinking about something that Ina said in the very beginning of this, that this whole life, this whole beautiful, gorgeous life that Ina is living, and teaching us all, and inviting us all into started when she saw this teeny, little teeny advertisement in a newspaper, and she thought this thought, “God, that looks like fun.” Pod squad, what is the thing that you just go, “God, that looks like fun.” I know the world tells you that’s not the thing you’re supposed to follow, but is that our voice or somebody else’s?
Amanda Doyle:
Word. If Ina had done the self-sacrificing thing that her dad told her was associated with accomplishments, we would have no Ina.
Glennon Doyle:
She would never have learned how to play beer pong.
Abby Wambach:
That’s for sure.
Ina Garten:
I never would have been there.
Glennon Doyle:
Not a once would she have learned beer pong. That’s the real tragedy.
Ina Garten:
So all’s well that ends well.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
Be ready when the luck happens. It’s a damn delight.
Glennon Doyle:
It is a damn delight.
Amanda Doyle:
It will make you think that the silly little thing that your heart desires might turn into an empire of joy. You want to read it. It made me so happy. It made me have a little bit more of a crush on you and a crush on me, actually, which I think is the best thing.
Ina Garten:
That’s the best thing ever. Thank you. So happy to see all of you. Thank you so much. It was just… What a great time.
Abby Wambach:
Thank you so much for being here. Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
I love you, Ina.
Ina Garten:
I hope you see you all soon.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Me too. Me too.
Amanda Doyle:
Also, thank you Taylor.
Abby Wambach:
Thank you, Taylor.
Ina Garten:
Thank you, Taylor, for introducing us.
Abby Wambach:
Our two stories, us two telling this one story will never end. The story that keeps on giving.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, I know. Trust me. I know. That’ll never end again.
Ina Garten:
I love that we both have the same story.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Ina Garten:
Usually stories kind of veer off another direction. We have exactly the same story. Love all three of you.
Abby Wambach:
Love you too.
Ina Garten:
Thank you.
Abby Wambach:
Thank you so much.
Amanda Doyle:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Bye Pod Squad.
Amanda Doyle:
Love it.