I admit, I don't know much about Anthony Bourdain. From cultural osmosis, I gather he's a cook, but also a travel writer, and apparently is viewed as a well respected thinker?
If someone isn't interested in cooking or travel, does his books pierce through and provide any philosophical insights/guidance, or do you have to be interested in those topics to make it worth reading?
While I understand I'm limiting myself by not really learning this in depth, I never got deep into theory so my intuition has guided most of my creativity. I never was trained on time signatures or a dotted quarter note, I just knew how to feel the timing in my head. I liked the sounds of and tried to include things like tritones, 7th chords, phrygian mode, C#/A... before I had any understanding of how it works or what it's called.
So from the basics of beats and measures, to modes and poly-rhythms, all the way to set theory and negative harmony - how much of it did you already know by feel and formal training simply gave a name to the ideas you already used, and how much did you have no awareness of prior to learning the theory first and then incorporated into your playing?