NEW YORK, NY July 17 (DPI) – Sometimes the least professional interviews reveal the most interesting remarks and insights, and so it was with Anthony Bourdain’s 2 1/2 hours in a Manhattan bar with a reporter of a recently launched news site back in February.

The reporter, Maria Bustillos, disclosed that she found the 61-year-old Bourdain sexy, she drank Malbec (and he Stellas Artois) throughout the interview, she got tipsy – and she then accepted Bourdain’s invitation up to his midtown apartment.

The play-by-play stopped there, thankfully,  but it was all enough to remind journalists that the professional guardrails have been fairly well demolished in the digital age – that anyone can say pretty much anything as a journalist these days, and still call it journalism.

Of course, the subject-interviewer dynamic has always been complicated – but the ease of disclosure and lack of editing filters these days makes for some interesting details about the interview process.

Since Bourdain’s suicide last month there’s new interest in his personal views and remarks, and Bustillos’s rambling interview with Bourdain served up a lot of insight – on Trump, on Obama, even on Bill Clinton. Many of his remarks – thoughtful and critical of presidents, among others -have been the focus of the US media in recent weeks. The Washington Post picked up on the interview this week.

His insights on Trump were lauded by readers as spot-on:

“I think Trump’s going down for the money. Collusion is tricky to prove, it’s the money,” Bourdain said. “And once they get too close, in my view he will declare victory, congratulate himself on the fantastic job he’s done and resign, saying the job is too small for him. Just what he did in Atlantic City! I got mine, big success for me, and leave behind a shambles.”

The media though ignored many of Bourdain’s bigger insights from his interview with Bustillos: The US media, he said, is surprisingly myopic:

The worst thing about North American journalism is its insularity: the feeling that the United States is the world. And this is true even of the New York Times; nothing comes from the perspective of other places…

Further, Bourdain described his experiences producing his food shows in foreign countries, whose governments tried to control his movements and access:

The lethal mistake is to accept the cooperation of any official entities, tourism officials or governments… we really try to avoid that. If it’s a country where they insist on assigning an escort, like in Bhutan you have to have an approved tour guide at least there. You can set your own agenda.

Other countries… you think it’s your driver or your translator but actually they work for the interior ministry and behind your back, they’re quietly terrorizing or intimidating the people you might be talking to, to make sure they know ahead of time not to say anything that might embarrass their government or worse—worst of all, trying to make reality appear better than it is.

In which case, someone shows up the day before, visits the local butcher in this tiny little town in Transylvania that we wanted to shoot, decides that their home is not pretty enough and moves them to somebody else’s home, where they’re going to pretend it’s their home, and then dresses the kids up—insists that their poor kids dress up in traditional Transylvanian garb, and dance—it’s all so stiff and horrible. Of course we knew all this right away, and in the case of the Romania show, it was just a horrible and really mean Borat-like comedy, because we showed every bit of artificiality and manipulation and requests for bribes and you know, all of that. It was ugly. We don’t set out to do that; we try to avoid that.

In a repressive state, there are often people who will try to gently nudge you away from shooting vital military infrastructure, the men in balaclavas in the van, dragging people out of their homes, but other times it’s more subtle. Like in Egypt, they didn’t want us to shoot foul, the everyday street food. They were absolutely apoplectic when we said we wanted to shoot it and we never understood why, initially.

Bourdain’s legacy is just beginning to be felt. The New Yorker recently re-published a 1999 essay by Bourdain on the secrets of NY restaurant kitchens.  The essay in many respects launched Bourdain to his fame and career as a television show host.