Christina Tosi: "To be great at anything, you must be obsessed with failure. You must love it. You must let it fuel you. If you are not failing, you are not pushing, you are not reaching, you are not stretching, you are not taking chances."

Ilana Golan, host of the Leap Academy Podcast: "Our guest today took her passion for baking and used it to start Milk Bar. She's been called one of the most creative people by Fast Company. She's a two-time James Beard Award winner and a New York Times bestselling author of seven cookbooks. Christina Tosi."

Christina Tosi: "There was a spot that came available next to one of the restaurants, and he said, 'You should take that space. I'll give you the money. I believe in you. I know you're good for it. We'll figure it out. You should just do it.' And this is literally a laundromat that we're talking about. It's a laundromat. And you want to know what, girl? Ten p.m. to two a.m. is our busiest time at Milk Bar still to this day."

Ilana Golan, host of the Leap Academy Podcast: "Oh my god, that's insane."

Christina Tosi: "Every piece of cake is the difference between us making our rent and not making our rent, making payroll and not making payroll. You are going to mess up. My best advice for anyone in kitchen land, and honestly in any profession..."

Ilana Golan, host of the Leap Academy Podcast: "Our guest today started from baking with her mother and grandmother, and took that passion for baking to start Milk Bar. Yes, it's a crazy story, so I can't wait to share it. Milk Bar has grown into a national dessert empire, known for its yummy care packages showing up on your doorstep — hey, I would love that — across the US, literally putting smiles on people's faces. What an incredible way to do it. So, first of all: Christina Tosi. Again, she's been called one of the most creative people by Fast Company. She's a two-time James Beard Award winner, a TED speaker, and a New York Times bestselling author of seven cookbooks. She's also invited bakers into her home kitchen weekly through Bake Club. It's such a fun conversation. Hey, Christina, I'm so excited about this."

Christina Tosi: "Ilana, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to hang."

Ilana Golan, host of the Leap Academy Podcast: "It's going to be so, so fun. And I'll just remind the listeners of one thing: every single week we choose a question from the Leap Academy with Ilana Golan YouTube channel, so go there. Today I've selected a question from Marina, which is: how can you decide what's next for you in the fastest way possible? It's such a great question, even for this conversation. I'll give you my 555 rule right after this conversation, but stick around — it's going to be amazing, because Christina is also going to talk about it. So fun."

Ilana Golan: "Christina, so fun to have you on the show."

Christina Tosi: "Ilana, hello. How are you?"

Ilana Golan: "It's going to be so fun. So, I'm going to take you back in time. As a kid, you were already baking with your mom and grandma, so you kind of loved this from the get-go, right? Did you know this was going to be a career for you, or was it just kind of a fun thing?"

Christina Tosi: "No. Baking was something that happened regularly in my home. My mom was a working mom, which meant I spent a lot of time with my grandmas. They helped sort of in the in-between. My mom is an accountant, so especially from January to April 15th, we would see her very little. On some level, as a parent now, I think, oh my gosh, that would be so hard — my kids, and this and that. But what I found, and what I find regularly, is that modeling was far more productive. I knew my mom loved me, and when she wasn't working, she was home and she was with me. But what she modeled to me is what it looked like to chase down something you were really passionate about professionally. Now, I spent a lot of time in the home kitchen growing up, because my grandmas were like my babysitters, and my grandmas cooked and they baked. Nothing fancy — I'm talking styrofoam plates of oatmeal cookies, some boiled chicken, some corn bake. Just really down-home Midwest roots. But I was raised to pay attention to the things that I was excited about. And I was raised to give the things that really drew me in everything I had. There was no middling in my family. My parents raised us to say, 'If you're going to do something, you make it worth your time. You go at it with all you've got.' I think they really hoped that I was going to be an incredibly passionate dentist, or a very *[laughter]* passionate lawyer. My dad was an agricultural economist, so he had this love of economics and farmers. I think they really hoped that my application of passion would be something a little bit more, air quotes, 'professional.' So I was on that path. I grew up with the expectation that I would succeed in school, that I would get straight A's, that I would be yielding, that I would honor my elders, respect my teachers, follow the rules. And I did all of that. I went to college, and my favorite subjects were math, first and foremost. So I thought, I'm going to be an engineer. And then I got into engineering school and started going at it my first year, and thought, this science thing — I don't know. It's fine. It's fine. I'm not excited to go to my science classes; I'm excited to go to my math classes. So I thought, I'll be a math major. And then I started taking language classes, and I fell in love with the Italian language, which is part of my heritage. And I thought, I'll be an Italian major. So I'm sprinting down the finish line of college with these majors. And I realize, almost as I'm walking across in my cap and gown to get my diploma — like the screeching of car wheels — 'Wait a second. What comes next is: I do one of these things for a living, which is to say, I do them passionately for the rest of my life.' My parents both had the same job their entire life. And I thought, I don't know who's going to pay me to do math problems in the corner of this room, at that table, my whole life. I couldn't imagine it. I started doing a little research — I interned at an actuary, and I was like, these are not my — I mean, mathematically speaking, they're my people, but on a personal level, what I found in myself was: I want to cross my legs when I sit in a chair, Indian-style, you know? I knew I had some sort of informal rule-breaking spirit in me. I really wanted to move around, to witness the world, to be on an adventure in my professional life. And I knew it wasn't going to be through math or Italian."

Ilana Golan: "Oh my god. So what was the first job? You finish school, you get the first job, and then what?"

Christina Tosi: "Okay, well, first of all, I had a few. I'm a very big believer in odd jobs along your way. My mom's accounting firm was always near our house. Now, my mom pushed us into all these jobs — I want to be clear, as a parent, I'm not sure I like it. You could have self-starting children, but also sometimes you have to give people a little push."

Ilana Golan: "A push."

Christina Tosi: "So I was working the mail room, the shredder, doing all the odds and ends, sort of assisting-type jobs at her accounting firm. And I thought, this is kind of cool, but I don't know that this is for me all the time. Over the summers in college, I would have different temp jobs. I was a receptionist at different firms — an actuary, a law firm. I followed a vet one day thinking maybe I'll be a vet, and then I was like, nope, that blood part is not for me. I followed a lawyer at a courthouse one day and thought, I'm going to be a judge, this is going to be perfect — and I went and was like, this is definitely a lot different than I thought it was going to be. So I tried a lot of different things on for size. But when I got out of college, I had this inkling. The one thing that I could imagine doing every single day for the rest of my life and never getting sick of was making cookies. It was very simple. It felt almost like an informal, non-serious answer, but it was the only answer that was really there — right in the dead center. It was making cookies. And I started doing some research, and it was like, okay, if you make cookies professionally, you're a chef, you're a pastry chef. So I thought, okay, I'll get a job at a restaurant in college. Or — I convinced someone to let me run this bakery on an island off the coast of New Hampshire. Don't ask. I didn't lie. I think somebody just maybe said, 'She makes good cookies.' You know what I mean? Somebody said something nice about me that maybe postured that I had any level of professional experience. But Ilana, I went to this conference center. My job was to run a bakery. I was used to a stand mixer that you have in your own home, and all of a sudden someone puts me in front of a 140-quart mixer — that's big enough for you to take a bubble bath in. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to figure it out — I was raised to figure it out. I'm left to my own devices, but I was tasked with baking breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 600 to 800 people every single day."

Ilana Golan: "Wait, Christina, I have to stop you here. First of all, I want the listeners to hear the level of experimentation that went on here. You tried a lot of different things, and it kept coming back to 'I love cookies' and baking. But how did you go from that to actually landing a job to run a bakery? What did you actually do to land it? How did you create it and say, 'This is my zone of genius'? Because you'd done all the rest of the things."

Christina Tosi: "Yeah. When I first said, 'I want to make cookies,' I thought I should probably get some experience. One of my number-one things: when I think I want to do something, I dip my toe in the water. I call my bluff. When I was like, 'Okay, you're going to be a math major,' I told myself I had to go intern at this actuary firm — and I was like, nope. Go and see. Try it on. It's like going into a dressing room. I think that looks cute, you put it on... not for me. You'll know. You'll know when you find it. So I went to get a job at a restaurant. Only, surprise perhaps to no one — this was a different time, but not that long ago — no one would let me work in the kitchen. I had no kitchen experience. But they would let me work in the front of house as a hostess, the person that greets you and brings you to your table. But I talked my way into the kitchen, essentially. I worked at this restaurant for two years during college, and they wouldn't let me in — I mean, I was allowed in the kitchen to say, 'Someone's at your table, Joe, someone's at your table.' But what I ended up doing was making friends with the chef and with the cooks. I would bake cookies in my little college apartment and bring them into the restaurant every day just to let people know: I'm interested, I'm here, I'm engaged. We're talking brownies, cookies sandwiched with frosting — nothing fancy, nothing outlandish. Just sort of communicating to my peers: I love food, I want to feed you, this is a place I want to be, this is a community I want to be a part of. And little by little, I got a little bit better. I started feeding people. They started expecting, when I came to work, that there would be a baked good. Eventually that chef was like, 'I will let you work one prep shift. It starts at 6:00 a.m. on a Monday morning.' And I was like, 'Great. That's a foot in the door.' So I went to that shift. I built up this experience. But my first thing was — like the dressing-room analogy — try it on for size. I loved working as a hostess in this restaurant. You couldn't be further from a kitchen job, you couldn't be further from making cookies. But I was like, I'm going to make it my job to make cookies for my job. If they won't pay me to make cookies, I'm going to make it my job to feed them cookies until I get good enough that they give me a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. You've got to bring people along your journey. But first, for me, it was the confirmation that what was in my heart and my head actually checked out with what made me feel alive in real life. And I built from there. I thought, okay, this is it, I'm going to move to New York City — the great pastry chef, in my brain. I went to one of the most challenging culinary schools in the city, the most demanding but the most rich and bright and vibrant from a culinary perspective. So I decided, I'm going to move to New York City. I'm going to go to culinary school by day and work in restaurants by night, because I've got to catch up. This is my destiny, and I'm behind. I've got to catch up. So I moved to New York."

Ilana Golan: "At that point, are you all in? Do you know that you want to do baking or cooking for the rest of it? Is that all in for you, or not yet?"

Christina Tosi: "No, I'm all in. I'm a cannonballer, quite frankly. I got this job on this island called Star Island because I got my foot in the door of that restaurant in college. Someone there knew someone, and said, 'Hey, if you really want to try baking, let me see if I can make a call.'"

Ilana Golan: "Oh, so good."

Christina Tosi: "I didn't ask them for a favor. They extended me the favor, because they thought, this person is passionate and they're worth my time, they're worth my energy. So they made the call. It was my first shift running this bakery on an island off the coast of New Hampshire. And to be clear, Ilana, I crashed and burned. I made bread for 800 people in a giant mixing bowl, and it did not — I'd made bread before, but not for 800 people. The bread did not rise. It was the most embarrassing day on record of my life. I remember climbing up the stairs to my little rickety bedroom on this island, being both so embarrassed and so exhausted and so completely obsessed and invigorated. And I thought, that is never going to happen to me again. I am going to wake up in a few short hours and start to bake breakfast for these people."

Ilana Golan: "Take me there just a second, Christina. Because first of all, in a kitchen you'll have a lot of mistakes — there are a ton of mistakes, and you need to recover. But take me to a hard moment, because it sounds really hard. It sounds humiliating, embarrassing. It sounds like, 'I disappointed myself, and I disappointed others that trusted me.' How do you decide to recover, versus turning into a ball and saying, 'This is not for me anymore'?"

Christina Tosi: "It's such a great question, Ilana. I was raised by parents who pushed me. I was raised by a mom who embarrassed me all the time — either because she was cheering embarrassingly loud on a cross-country field for me and every other person running, or she'd take embarrassing photos of us, doing the things that loving, adoring parents do. So this idea of being embarrassed was something I had already learned. The skill of, 'It's embarrassing, and — you want to know what? — you survive.' You survive every embarrassing moment. And the only thing you can do to survive it is to just get on with it. The sooner you get on with it, the more you realize that it is embarrassing, and it's fleeting. Embarrassment is fleeting. This notion of 'I failed' was a big one. It wasn't the first time I'd failed in life. It wasn't the first time I didn't get an A. It wasn't the first time I tried something and it didn't go to plan. Now, it felt more visible — there were 800 people, they thought I was some incredible baker, they took a giant shot on me. But it didn't occur to me at the time — if you take me back there, these very negative, traumatizing things were heavy. But you want to know what they didn't outweigh? They didn't outweigh my enthusiasm. They didn't outweigh the 'holy smokes, this is what it feels like to work a day in a kitchen, where you are baking for people and feeding people and making something out of nothing.' And even though the something out of nothing that I made did not rise — it didn't taste bad, it didn't do what it was supposed to do, but it was a step. And as opposed to feeling like a step back, it felt like a step. That's the interesting part of it. To be great at anything — this most certainly rings true in the kitchen — to be great at anything, you must be obsessed with failure. You must love it. You must let it fuel you. If you are not failing, you are not pushing, you are not reaching, you are not stretching, you are not taking chances — you are replicating something that is safe, that has already existed before. In the kitchen, it's a very visible profession, with your peers. You are going to mess up. My best advice for anyone in kitchen land, and honestly in any profession: work for someone else first. I know everyone is so excited to run into the water and do their own thing first. I highly recommend: whatever that answer is that's burning in your belly, that you're so passionate about — learn it from someone else. Make mistakes on someone else's dime before you start paying for your own mistakes out of pocket. It will teach you to be humble. It will teach you to be additive. It will teach you to pay attention, so that from your failures and someone else's failures next to you, you get to learn twice as quick — and you also get to succeed twice as quick, because you're not just learning on your own, you're learning in the community of people you're working with and alongside. That's what I found in a kitchen. I found a lot of humility. I also found a lot of humor. And I ultimately, over time, found success."

Ilana Golan: "And then you also mentioned some really profound mentors. I absolutely agree with what you're saying — having some mentors or people to look up to initially is really, really important. And I do believe you can kind of decide what kind of leader you want to be, or what kind of chef you want to be. There's so much you can learn from watching and looking at others. So where is that — on the island, do you decide, 'Even though I'm failing from time to time, and things are not working well, I still love this, this is what I want to do'? And how do you attest that to Milk Bar? What happened? Why did you decide to start your own?"

Christina Tosi: "It was like the rest of the world melted away. Nothing else mattered except for time spent in this rickety old island kitchen. I was obsessed. Didn't take a day off — 6:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. at night, just go. Loved everything about it. I loved the hard work, I loved the celebration, I loved the heartache. I loved everything about it. A lot of the things I got from that island taught me a lot. It's an island, so you don't get ingredients every day, so you had to be really savvy and creative about ingredients. The compost cookie — the cookie that put Milk Bar on the map — is a cookie I learned how to make at Star Island, because it was a running joke: when a storm came in, you still had to feed people. Everyone was on this island. So the bakers that came before me would bake this cookie, and they would just go to the pantry, grab whatever random things they could find, and put it in. It was called the compost cookie because we would compost on the island as well. I had that in my back pocket. I learned so much about not wasting, being really creative with limitations — limitations actually being the thing that breeds the highest form of creativity. Learning how to problem-solve, learning how to get it done even when there's no backup plan. But I realized very quickly that this was it. So I started researching on the island: how do I get into culinary school? How do I find my way in? How do I get someone to let me into culinary school as quickly as possible? How do I find a place to live? How do I find a place to work? And the second I was done working at Star Island, I was on my way to New York City. I told my parents this, Ilana, a few days before I left, and they were not happy. *[laughter]* They were not happy, because they were first-generation college-goers. They worked hard for me to make sensible, passionate decisions. Baking was something that they did, that grandmas did — we did that in our free time. We did not do that professionally. Why would you do that? That doesn't make any sense. But it made sense to me. I didn't need it to make sense to them. It made sense here. So I went. I found an apartment in New York City by literally just pounding the pavement, figuring out how to get to a viewing before anyone else. I actually found my apartment because I was waiting outside the building."

Ilana Golan: "Christina, what year are we roughly at this point?"

Christina Tosi: "We're 2003. 2003, 2004. I found a listing in the newspaper for an apartment that would be within walking distance. I made friends with the culinary school admissions person, first and foremost, on the island. The only phone call I would ever make was to Elizabeth — I can't remember her last name — Elizabeth at the French Culinary Institute, which is now the International Culinary Center."

Ilana Golan: "Amazing."

Christina Tosi: "I was like, 'We are going to figure this out together, Elizabeth. You tell me: someone's got to get sick, have an emergency, whatever it is. You tell me when that is, and I will get in a car and get to New York. I'll get on a bus, I'll get on a plane, I'll get on a train. I'll do whatever it takes.' And I got there, and I thought, I don't know anybody, and I need a place to live. So I found a listing for an apartment. The building number was right; the apartment number was wrong. But I got there an hour before the showing. And I realized, when the real estate agent showed up, that the apartment number was wrong. And I was like, I'm not going to tell this person. I'm pretty sure this is the New York City story everyone talks about, right? How do you get your leg up in the right way? Got an apartment, found a roommate to help me pay the rent, was within walking distance to culinary school. Then I started walking around to every restaurant that had any rating I could be proud of, to get a job. Guess what? No one would hire me for a kitchen job, Ilana. I didn't have New York City experience. How do you get New York City experience if you don't have New York City experience? I did the same thing — someone let me be the reservationist, because I did have experience being a reservationist at those other firms back home. I did the same thing, only this time I was in a New York City apartment. So I wasn't baking; I would just bring, every single day from culinary school, whatever we made, and I'd bring it to the restaurant and feed my peers. And I'd make sure everyone knew that I was a culinary school student, and that this is what I wanted to do. And eventually the bartender's friend was the wine director at Bouley — the best restaurant in New York City at the time, in Tribeca, Bouley. He said, 'I know someone that works there that's high enough up. Do you want me to see if I can get you a job in the pastry department?'"

Ilana Golan: "Yeah."

Christina Tosi: "Guess what? They were going to give me a job. I didn't have any New York City experience, but I said, 'I will come and work for you for free, every free moment I have.' And I did. I showed up every single day to work for them."

Ilana Golan: "Let's stop here for a second. Everybody listening — one of the things we talk about a lot on the show is the hidden market. This is a hidden market. It's not a post from a newspaper or the internet or a job board. It just comes your way. This is about who knows you according to what you want to be known for, opening the door and letting you in. And it's also about the hustle, the volunteering. You're going to need to make your own luck. So I love all of this, Christina. Okay, so you're finding this. But you're right — you have to give people something to believe in."

Christina Tosi: "We're all humans. We all crave connection. I am an introvert. Those people — they didn't know my middle name, they didn't know where I lived, they didn't know if I had siblings, they didn't know anything about me. But they knew that I'm the girl that brings dessert to work every single day. That's what I do, that's who I am, that's what I do. That's the only thing they need to know. And more than anything, if you're willing to give — to give first, to show up, to be a person that is worth someone's time in getting to know or believing in — networking doesn't have to be icky or yucky or feel laborious. Stick to what you know and what you know how to do, and figure out how to show up for other people. If you lead with that... I wasn't a leader at the time. I was literally at the bottom of the food chain. But I led. I led with dessert, and I led by giving, and I created this tiny little microculture. And I wish I'd known what I was doing at the time. Stepping back, I'm like, that was a great idea. That wasn't my master plan. It's just the card that I had. It was the only card I had, and it was the only thing that mattered to me. And that's what I did every single time. Dessert, also, by the way, Ilana — it's a pretty easy 'in.' It's not part of the food pyramid. You don't have to eat dessert. Breakfast, lunch, dinner — there's no mention of dessert. It's an opt-in course. It's inherently joyful. It's inherently the thing we show up with in good times and bad. There's an altruism, but there's a social conduit about dessert that communicates warmth and friendship and care. Thank goodness — because what would I do, hand someone a math problem? You know what I mean? *[laughter]* Otherwise I'd be lost. So I got my first job at this New York City restaurant. And you'd better believe it was a job, but it was not paying. It was an unpaid internship, and it was going to be unpaid until they saw some sort of value in me enough that they were like, 'Okay, now you can be a paid employee.' And that took about six months of working for free in every free moment possible before I got offered my first paid New York City gig as a pastry cook at Bouley. Even then, I worked my way up in this amazing fine-dining restaurant. It was intense. It's like cutting your teeth at one of those really big, well-known, renowned, resume-building places. I went in there and I got my ticket freaking punched. And I knew I was going to give every last bit of me to survive, to thrive. But when I was at Bouley for a year and a half — in restaurants, you stay a minimum of one year, that's a minimum — I realized, I really love this, but I started kind of wondering, is this right for me? Part of that was the curiosity about fine dining, because I had told myself: professional pastry chef, that's what someone who makes cookies every day does to be taken seriously. So I was chasing this pastry chef career. And after I was done working at Bouley, what I started to do was go, 'I really loved that job. Was that me? Is that right for me?' I started finding all these other jobs within my industry — editorial assistant at a magazine, food stylist, caterer, consulting pastry chef for a tiny cafe restaurant."

Ilana Golan: "Did you try them as well? Do you try different roles?"

Christina Tosi: "I worked in all of them. I actually used the job board of my school to try all these other things on, because I thought maybe I'm supposed to be a food writer — maybe that's making cookies. Maybe I'm supposed to be a food stylist or a food photographer — maybe that's making cookies. Maybe I should go work in the front of house at a fine-dining restaurant — maybe it's that. I tried all these other little things on for size, because Bouley was the right fit for me, but at some point I grew out of it, and I was trying to figure out what that cue was for me. I tried all these other jobs on within my industry — a little bit like the lost duckling going, 'Are you my mother? Are you my mother?' I went back into the dressing room: okay, I've tried it on — is this right for me? Is it these, or these, or these? And what I found, getting out of the kitchen and trying all these other things on, is that I learned so much. I was challenged, I was stimulated. I did come back to the fact that my place really was in the kitchen. Maybe it just wasn't in that kitchen. So I started working for other chefs that were doing things that were really interesting to me in food. I worked at WD-50, which was the molecular gastronomy restaurant in New York City that combined delicious food with really clever food science. I worked at Momofuku, which was the democratization of really good food — there was no white tablecloth, there were no reservations, but you got the level of flavor and creativity and cuisine at a really accessible price. And it was there that I said, 'Huh.' Run by Chef David Chang, founded by Chef David Chang — my brother from another mother. Similar upbringing: wasn't supposed to be a chef, fell in love with food, worked for fine-dining restaurants, and one day woke up and said, 'I want to cook on my terms. I've done it on the fine-dining level, but what about casual cuisine?' And it was working at Momofuku that I realized my answer was still making cookies, and that my real path and vision was taking home-cooked Christina and professional pastry chef Christina and meeting them in the middle. And that is Milk Bar. That is the reason Milk Bar exists. It's how Milk Bar was formed. Dave knew I had pastry experience, and eventually was like, 'This is crazy. You need to go and do your own thing.' He could see it in me there."

Ilana Golan: "So take me there — because I vaguely know the story, but take me there. It started in 2008, but I assume you were thinking about it for a little bit, right? What made you say, 'You know what, I'm going to leave the comfort'? You're in New York — one of the most expensive places on earth — and you're trying to do something where, in general, you don't even know if the margins will hold. It's not easy. So you need to bet and decide: 'I'm not going to take a salary, I'm actually going to go all in and do this crazy thing, take a loan, and do it.' Take me there. Where were you, how was your thinking around it? Obviously David was a big part in helping you out, but tell me a little bit — how did it work?"

Christina Tosi: "I had been working with Dave for over a year. And I started working with Dave not in a pastry capacity — also in my free time. I thought maybe I'll be a food safety consultant, because I like dorky things like math and food science. I taught myself how to write these hazard analysis plans that we needed in order to use specific cooking techniques in New York City. And I started working for Dave just to help him do that. I loved his food, I believed in what he was doing, I was very much drawn to his spirit and personality. He's a bull in a china shop, and I'm a bull in a china shop — we just do it differently. I was really drawn to him, and it was clear that he was onto something and that he needed help. By the way, that's a tip for anyone: work at the places that are understaffed in the right way — that are understaffed, they're onto something, they're on the precipice of something, they're doing something special, and they don't yet have it figured out. Because what it gives you the ability to do is get your hands in as many different pieces of helping solve that as possible. And that real-life experience of building and learning and solving — it's irreplaceable."

Ilana Golan: "I want to take you there for a second, Christina, and I want the listeners to add it up. Because what you need is massive curiosity to understand what is actually needed. Sometimes we put people on some pedestal — 'Oh, they're running this mega business or operations, I'm just going to do my little thing.' But if you can actually stay really, really curious and very creative — Christina, we'll talk about it — this is where you're going to find areas to grow into and create your own basic shoes from that. It's just incredible. So I love that story. I had to stop you, but okay — it's so important."

Christina Tosi: "By the way, no one has it figured out. Listeners, to be crystal clear: if that self-talk exists in your head, highlight it and delete it, get rid of it. No one has it figured out. Everyone is in the process of having it figured out. And the best people to work for are the people who are willing to say, 'I don't have it figured out, can you help?' or 'I'm trying to figure it out, let's go.' That is what Dave did, what I saw and learned from him. Alongside him, we built — I helped him build his restaurants out. Noodle Bar and Ssäm Bar. We were about to open Momofuku Ko. We needed to renovate Ssäm Bar. I became the de facto person that was helping put together the details and make decisions. I had trust, because I was in it every day. So I watched how Dave built and made decisions and thought about things and looked at real estate, and I used that as my model. It was a little bit like the wild, wild west, because we didn't have business plans. Of course we had to find money from the bank, and the renovations, the rent, the lease negotiations — they had to make sense and line up. But neither one of us had been to business school. And also, by the way, the math isn't that hard to figure out. We were very much people who were like, 'We'll figure it out.' We figured it out in the moment as we went, knowing round numbers, back-of-napkin math. We weren't taking down a lease that was $50,000 a month and charging $12 for a bowl of noodles. We had a sense of what we could do in a night from a dollar standpoint, how much labor cost, etc. So when it was time to leave the roost of Momofuku and start this bakery — perhaps I'll hit pause on it and say: while I was working at Momofuku with Dave, I would work there by day, and by night, guess what I would do when I went home every night? I would bake, and I would bring those baked goods in the next day. So Dave not only knew I was a trained pastry person, but he also tasted the baked goods that I would make day in and day out, because that's what I would do. And he saw that I had this passion for baking, that I had this burning thing. And he said there was a spot that came available next to one of the restaurants, and he said, 'You should take that space. I'll give you the money. I believe in you. I know you're good for it. We'll figure it out. You should just do it. For us, from a restaurant standpoint, if somebody else went into that space, it could be potentially problematic.' So he sort of masqueraded it as doing me a favor — 'You're doing us all a favor, because if we don't like our new neighbors, it could be bad. So you go in, we'll find a one-plus-one-equals-three situation, and go.' And I very smartly used shared resources at Momofuku — whether it was warewashing or porters or receiving or accounting or human resources — to prop up this idea of a quirky, American-style bakery that was born out of the love of being a home cook, and what power a cookie, a cake, a pie — these really simple American formats — can hold and wield, but bringing in flavor and reinvention and technique that I had learned for a decade in kitchens. And this is literally a laundromat that we're talking about."

Ilana Golan: "It's a laundromat."

Christina Tosi: "So, you want to know what else I know, Ilana? Because I'm in charge now of all the restaurants when we're looking at new spaces. Guess what? A laundromat has a ton of water, waste lines, and a lot of electricity coming in. So if I'm thinking, just brass tacks, what's this space's viability for a food service establishment — I've got to get it rezoned, but it has all the resources coming in that cost money and take time. And at the very least, I know what the rent is, I know my neighbors are good, and I know my neighbors are pulling people in for lunch and dinner seven days a week from 11:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m. And even though I'm trying to run a bakery, and I think a bakery's hours are like 7:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. — if I stay open till 2:00 a.m., I might be able to do business until 2:00 a.m. And you want to know what, girl? Ten p.m. to two a.m. is our busiest time at Milk Bar still to this day."

Ilana Golan: "Oh my god, that's insane. So you decide to take a loan, and again, you have this confidence that you can do this — and you also did a bit of that with Dave. So you already start; you feel it."

Christina Tosi: "Equipment — I knew some of our subcontractors, and we opened things. What I loved about Dave's approach was he only spent money where it was absolutely necessary. If any of you ever dined at Momofuku in the early 2000s, there were barely seats. There were no backs on the seats. We made our own tables, we scrubbed our own walls, we painted our own ceilings. We did everything ourselves — and in a beautiful way. It made it really humble, but it made a difference when you came in. It felt like it was someone's true expression, that it was everything they had in it. And it was very cost-efficient for us. It inspired in our organization a culture of solving problems and being financially efficient in decisions — and not, 'I'm a chef, so here's what I do, I cook, and that's what I do.' You had to know your numbers. You had to know how to unclog a toilet. You had to know how to drop a ceiling. *[laughter]* You had to know how to wire an outlet sometimes. You learned these things, because every time you needed somebody else to help you solve a problem, it was going to cost money, and that meant that some part of the experience would be sacrificed."

Ilana Golan: "I love it. So take me there, Christina. Some people — and it doesn't matter if it's a restaurant or a tech company or a startup — some people feel like the launch is all that matters. But actually, the hardest thing is after you open. So talk to me about the early days. Because there's so much myth around, 'I have to launch this!' And I'm like, no — you actually need to think about what's going to happen on day one and day ten, month one. So take me there."

Christina Tosi: "The opening day is literally just the starting line. It is just the starting line of a marathon — a marathon that will never end, in a very beautiful, joyful way. Opening day was November 15th, 2008. And I, much like many others, thought, 'Opening day — great, got it done, check the box,' rather than thinking, 'Well, this is the first day of the rest of my life.' And I mean that in an amazing way, and I mean that in the sense of the biggest challenge I will ever take on. I remember showing up on opening day at 4:00 a.m., as bakers do, and there had already started a line out the door and around the block. I thought, who are these people waiting in line for? They don't even know what we are. This is 2008 — there's no social media, there's no blog drops, whatever. They read an article somewhere, and they knew the Momofuku name enough to know this is going to be good. And I very quickly had to drink water through a fire hose, as they say. I was trained at this, because I'd been working in restaurants for a decade. I had to learn trial by fire, day in and day out. Everything from the simplest things: we went to open the door and we didn't have — we had a printed menu, but we didn't have a menu hanging. All right — take the back off a stainless steel table, hang it from the ceiling, write in dry-erase marker. Or, 'Oh, I didn't think about the fact that we were going to need a different amount of cash than we did at the restaurants,' because a bakery is doing high-velocity, lower ticket average. Our ticket average is $20; at the restaurant it's so much more than that. And people pay with credit card there; here it's cash. Hiring, firing, training, how we ordered, demand planning, the technique of how we made things — we were scooping every single cookie by hand. We were measuring everything down to the gram of cake soak that we would put on every layer of cake sponge before we built it up. We would take inventory every night and count every single thing: one, two, three, four. We had to scale our learning. AI did not exist then, but we basically had to import into our brains some level of that learning, that in-the-moment artificial-intelligence type of mindset, as we went — to figure out, how do you run a bakery? How do you keep a bakery's doors open seven days a week? How do you market? What are our bottlenecks? Where are our opportunities? Where are we missing the mark? And to be an entrepreneur, you have to have a Sisyphean complex — that, again, you're obsessed with. You have to love the idea of rolling a boulder up a hill every single day, only to know that when you go home, the boulder's going to roll back down the hill — and the next day, you could not be more excited about getting in and being like, 'Where's my boulder? I'm ready to go. What's my problem, what's my challenge? How am I keeping it real today? What am I celebrating? What are my highs, what are my lows, what did I learn? Did I leave this place better today than I found it?' And being in love with this — it feels sometimes, when you talk about it, like a circular pursuit, but every single day is different. It sometimes feels like the same action every day, but every single day is absolutely different. And I love that. It's humbling, it's humiliating, it's enthralling, it's captivating. Some days I'm starving because I've worked so hard, and other days I am so full I could not eat another piece of cake, because we can't get the carrot crackle marshmallow cake formula just right."

Ilana Golan: "How are you so thin?"

Christina Tosi: "I don't know. That's *[laughter]* what it is."

Ilana Golan: "So tell me for a second, Christina — because sometimes, and I want the listeners to get this, sometimes we look at this overnight success. We look at Christina, a couple decades into the future almost, and it's like, 'Oh my god, you're amazing, this is so cool what you built.' And we don't see the sleepless nights, we don't see the heartaches, the grind. So can you share a hard moment where you were like, 'What on earth have I put myself into?' A sleepless night, or something that happened?"

Christina Tosi: "So many of them. You're right, Ilana — we sensationalize. I don't think we do it intentionally, as people, from a media standpoint or otherwise, but we do sensationalize the highs in a way that doesn't leave a lot of room to talk about the day-to-day that you have to stack up. I'll give you a few little ones along the way. One day — it's a Sunday — and we were running low on chocolate chip passion fruit layer cake, and we needed to make some. Because every day, every piece of cake is the difference between us making our rent and not making our rent, making payroll and not making payroll. And those were always — to your point about the mentors I've had along the way — you're going to have a lot of great bosses, and you're going to have a lot of bad bosses too, and I learned from both sides. You learn who you want to be from the good ones, and you maybe learn who you don't want to be from the other ones — and how to thank them, because how else would you know what it feels like otherwise? I knew always: everyone gets paid on time. No matter what, that's always what happens. So we have to make these cakes, but it's Sunday. You don't get any deliveries. And no one ordered butter. If you're a bakery and no one orders butter, girl, you've got problems. You've got problems. We needed butter to make this frosting, let alone the fact that we needed butter to then get the rest of the prep list done. And I'm looking at everything, going — I'm going to every grocery store, etc. The food cost is going to be out of whack, we can't figure it out, there's not enough butter. And I'm standing with my face in the refrigerator, the way you do when you're trying to decide what to make for dinner on a Wednesday night, staring inside the refrigerator going, 'What are we going to do? What are we going to do? What are we going to do?' And all of a sudden, my eyes see it — that shopping-mall-nonsense thing where the eyes click and all of a sudden you can see what it is — I look at the heavy cream and I go, 'How do you make butter? You churn cream into butter. This is how you make butter.' And all of a sudden I'm like, 'Get all the heavy cream, bring it upstairs, we're putting it in the mixing bowl, we're mixing it until we turn it into butter, we're going to drain off the water, then we're going to make the frosting, then we're going to do this, then we're going to do that.' Resourceful. Our big stand mixer one day stopped working, and we couldn't get a repair person to come. After trying to sweet-talk these people and sweet-talk these people, I was like, well, we are going to mix 140 quarts of cookie dough with our hands. We're going to put Saran wrap up, because we're not going to say no. Someone's coming in for a cornflake chocolate marshmallow cookie, or a corn cookie, or a compost cookie. This is what we have to do to succeed. That's all there is to it. I do remember one day — the food critic of the time, his name was Alan Richman, he was the food writer for, I think, Esquire magazine, and he would come down from Connecticut, and Dave would be like, 'Hey, sis, you've got to meet this guy. He's going to love your cookies, he'll put you on the map,' blah blah blah. Nicest guy. Loved the cookies. And then was like, 'I live in Connecticut, I want to bring these cookies home to my neighbors to tell them all about it.' We put a bunch of cookies in a bakery box, sent him on his way. I get an email from him the next day, and my heart — I nearly puked. My heart just fell to the ground. 'Dear Christina, it's Alan. Thank you. Nice to meet you. I brought that glorious box of cookies home only to find them in absolute bits and pieces by the time I got home. Basically, get your act together. You cannot run a business like this. This is embarrassing. I can't give any of these to my neighbors. This is not what a bakery at your level should be doing. You do not have it together. If you want anything close to my support, you need to figure it the freak out.' Wow."

Ilana Golan: "Wow."

Christina Tosi: "And Ilana — of all the things I thought about: the amount of salt, the acidity — I didn't think about the fact that if I'm not handing you a cookie to eat right now — I had never put the cookies in a bakery box and tried bringing them on a train somewhere. That wouldn't even occur to me. And now we ship care packages all over the US, but it never occurred to me. I had put myself in my customer's shoes once they were in the door, but it never occurred to me what they did with it, and how it got to where they wanted to go with it after the fact. And that revamped everything we did — from how we mixed, to how we scooped our cookies, to how we packaged our cookies, so that you could get them warm and fresh out of the oven, but if you wanted to take them to go, those were going to be two different experiences. It was perhaps the most embarrassing moment of my career up until that point. This was my name on the door, on the proverbial door. And yet, one of the most important ones. When you're up against it, are you going to cower in shame and back down, or are you going to take a big gulp of air and say, 'You know what? He's right, and I missed it.' And he's telling me — not to embarrass me, though it is embarrassing — he's telling me because he's giving me a clue about what I need to do better if I want to make it tomorrow. And man, to this day I can still feel the energy in my body of what it felt like to be told off by the renowned food critic. It felt like I was grounded and in trouble as a kid. I can still feel the energy to this day. And yet it was the greatest thing — if he didn't say that, where would we be? I don't know."

Ilana Golan: "And what I love about it — first of all, I love this example, because sometimes the most embarrassing mistakes, or the hardest critics, are actually sharing something that could be the most profound opening for us. That happened for me as well. So I just love this example. And I'd love to take you there — how you kind of morphed yourself in COVID. Because that was so profound — if you didn't know how to ship cookies in a way that was intact, that would never work. So can you take me a little bit to COVID? Because that must be a hard one too."

Christina Tosi: "Yeah. So it's January 2020. We know something's kind of happening globally. Is it going to happen in the US? February, it's getting closer. March, it's on, we're locked down. We had, I can't remember, maybe 18 bakeries at the time nationwide. So we have a workforce — and still to this day, our bakery team is the biggest part of our team makeup. They're the people that leave their houses, their apartments, their homes every day to go into work, to show up for you all, our customers. And all of a sudden they're like, 'I'm told that I can't leave.' But we have this arm of our business that we built because we wanted to be able to show up for people that couldn't come and visit us in the bakery. We knew how to take our products and get them to people safely — to wrap them safely, to get them to people safely. And all of a sudden, we had to pivot our entire business from being single-digit percentages in-person, on-demand delivery, to being 90% online care-package delivery, as quickly as humanly possible. And what's interesting is, I always built the team so that if you're on our team — maybe you have a stake in Milk Bar — your bonus structure is based on the entire business's performance. It's not just based on the department you work in. And I would always get pushback on that. And I said, 'But it matters. Because if you only care about your 20 square feet or 30 square feet of the business, you're missing out on the team that you're a part of.' I thought, how do we breed in that spirit of everyone wanting — everyone needs to be a builder in here, and everyone needs to really want to reach out and help each other. And so I didn't realize that I had this system already in place to transfer people from being a physical, in-person bakery business to being an on-demand delivery care-package business almost entirely. Day by day, our team would transfer some people over: 'Okay, you're going to be more in the background, we're going to pack the boxes, your job's going to change from this to this.' But we had built the infrastructure enough, and a culture of caring and accountability, that we were able to do that. And then the other thing we did during COVID that was really big — we exist to make people happy with dessert. That is our mission at Milk Bar: we want to make people happy with dessert. We can ship you dessert, and we hope that dessert makes you happy — but how do we really show up for you with that spirit? One day I just decided: we can't bake for people that come and visit us, but how do we show up baking in people's homes? One day I just woke up and said, we're going to start doing it online. Let's just turn the camera around. Guess what I was doing all through COVID? Baking. So I thought, what if I turn the camera around on myself? This is what I'm doing naturally, it's what I've been doing my entire life, in between, in the margins — and I'm just going to welcome people into my home as I bake. I'm going to open my door. No one can come to my house, but I'm going to open my door anyways, because we can't open our physical doors, our bakery doors. So I started this thing called Bake Club. We already had this huge online business that was happening from a finished-baked-good standpoint, but what I missed was the spirit of being able to just be a human in the world. So I started this online baking community called Bake Club. It still exists. It is free for anyone that wants to come. You can learn how to bake, you can hone your baking skills, you get new baked goods and baking recipes once a week. Some people just come because they like to watch baked goods come to life. And it's been — we don't just want to sell you a cookie, that's not why we exist. My profession isn't to make cookies to sell them to you. I want to make you happy with dessert. And I found in COVID, really, the deeper meaning of why I do what I do. It's that baked goods are my conduit into the community, into the world, into people's lives. They do the talking when I can't. And that's been an incredibly wild ride. It's brought this incredible baking community. It's further enriched our community outright. We've always built Milk Bar thinking that our community should always be bigger than our customer base. Always. I think that outright is a really important business model. You don't need to convert every member of your community into a customer immediately. You want them to know who you are, and why you exist, and what you care about, and why you deserve a place in their lives — long before there's any transaction that's happened. That's been a really intentional part. And Bake Club has been really big for us in that way. That's my intention for the next — we're almost 18 this year — the next 18 years of Milk Bar: to keep leading with that humanity, humility, sense of humor, and the spirit of just showing up."

Ilana Golan: "Oh, I love this. And community is such a big piece that you're doing a lot of, and talking a lot about, bringing people into your home and doing all these creative things. I want to talk about them a little bit. But I also want to talk about how Christina is morphing — or morphed, if you will — from a baker to a CEO. Because that takes big growth, to look at yourself in a different light. What kind of growth did you find in yourself?"

Christina Tosi: "It's a good question, Ilana. I don't self-identify as a CEO. Funnily enough, I'm the type of person where I do best if I'm tricked into things — even if I'm the one that's tricking myself into it. Being the CEO of Milk Bar has been an important part of Milk Bar being Milk Bar, of Milk Bar existing, of Milk Bar surviving, of Milk Bar thriving through the years. For me, learning how to read a P&L, building a P&L, the economics down to the T — I could build you a business model for any bakery anywhere in the US now. But it's not because I went to school to do it, and it's not because someone sat me down and gave me a textbook to do it. It's been very much a learn-as-I-go, street-smart sort of thing. Very early on, it was easy to become that role, because that was the mission-critical piece. I knew how to make delicious cookies, cakes, and pies. It wasn't about proving to the world that I knew how to do that — it was, I have to learn how to do everything else needed in order to do the very thing that I want to do. I have to learn how to be the finance person, I have to learn how to be HR, I have to learn how to be the delivery person, the head of ops. I have to know packaging costs. I have to know how to buy a flow-wrap machine and how to set it up. I have to know what a julian date is. I have to know what a lot code is. I have to know how to demand-plan out based on my last years of sales. I need to know that we need to buy freeze-dried corn a year in advance if we want to put our corn cookies on the menu. They're just details. They're not scary details. Different people have different personalities. My personality is very much — I'm like a Clydesdale horse. That's my bull in a china shop. I put my blinders on. The only thing that matters to me is making people happy with dessert, going back to the spirit of making cookies. The other stuff that I've learned to do along the way, I'm proud that I've learned. They were just important steps that I stepped up to the plate and learned how to do, in order to get to a place where we get to make more cookies and more cake and more pie and show up in people's lives with them. Everything we do in life as humans is about how we phrase it to ourselves — how we talk to ourselves when no one's listening, how we talk to ourselves when people are listening. It's about how you approach yourself, and what you tell yourself you are capable of. And if you try to tell yourself you're not capable of something, I challenge you to give it another go. I obviously have this love of numbers and math, and that makes sense in my head. There are a lot of things I'm not great at, but I still do them, because I know they are an important part of the puzzle to being able to live out my dream every day. Listen, by the way — I feel like I'm talking as though I do it all. There is no 'I' at Milk Bar. I have an incredible team of humans along the way. I've had to learn how to do almost every single job — because how do you know how to hire for the job if you don't know what the job looks like and feels like, what kind of personality would suit it beyond the tactical things that would come across in someone's resume? And again, in that COVID example, being able to reach across and say, 'I don't know how to do that, can you teach me how to do it? I want to know how to do it. I'm capable of learning how to do it.' If I can be an electrician, a plumber, a general contractor, a drywall specialist — I definitely can figure out how to do the other things. So again, a lot of it is how we phrase things in our head, how we contextualize, and the things we tell ourselves we are and aren't capable of. And then surrounding ourselves with other people that are both different in skill sets but have a similar commonality in curiosity about what it takes to get the job done. The CEO part is like what it takes to get the job done, and doing it with curiosity, and studying what makes a great CEO — but also being open-minded about blazing your own trail as to what it looks like in your organization."

Ilana Golan: "That's incredible, and I love every piece of that answer, Christina. One thing I want to tap into for a second — because we have a lot of people listening to this who want to start a business, maybe, or want to become their own economy, so they're not depending on this one corporate ladder that is probably burning right now. So tell me a little bit — because from time to time, especially if you're bootstrapping, if you don't have millions and millions of spare dollars — there are going to be moments where you're like, 'I don't know how to make salaries.' Take me a little bit to that. What do you do? How do you recover as a CEO — or, as a founder — what do you do when you can't make payroll?"

Christina Tosi: "Yeah, it's such a great question. From that standpoint, it's dollars and cents. You have to know what money you have coming in, what you think you can depend on coming in regularly, and then what money you have going out the door. And if you don't have enough money coming in, you can't afford what you want. Quite frankly, that is something we deal with every single day at Milk Bar. We would love to have more resources than we do, but that's just not our reality. That's not what running a profitable business looks like for us today — that's changed over 18 years in a way that's interesting and compelling. You have to eat your vegetables, is kind of the long and the short of it. It means you're going to have to learn how to do more with less, or how to do the same with less. And it means you're going to be pushed out of your comfort zone, or that other people are going to be pushed out of their comfort zone. It goes back to that spirit, that drive: What are you doing? Do you believe in it? Is it right for you? Do you believe in doing it every single day? Do you believe in doing it early in the morning before anyone else has woken up, or late at night long after everyone else has gone to bed? Is it the thing you want to do when no one is looking and no one cares? And if your answer is still yes, then start going at the numbers and figure it out. A lot of times, as business people, as entrepreneurs, we get so excited about our vision that we decide we need things, because we can see into the future — our finger is on the pulse of what we're building. But sometimes the time isn't right, we don't have the dollars. And part of being an entrepreneur is being super passionate in our vision, and also being super patient in our pursuit. You can be pushy and patient at the same time. The 'eating your vegetables' is being really patient about what you get to have and when you get access to it. My personality is always: if I can figure out how to do it myself, it's free, it's no added cost to the business. I have a limited number of hours in a day, but I try to raise people at Milk Bar — we have an incredible team of people that are like-minded in that way — to believe that if you really believe in something, you will figure out how to get it done in a way that works. And just because your first pass at it, from a payroll standpoint, doesn't add up, doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means it needs refining. A lot of times the answer is sitting right in front of you, whether you realize it or not. It's kind of like the compost cookie: you will be more creative the second you limit your available resources and tools. That is true for kitchen and creativity, and it is also true for how you learn to run a business."

Ilana Golan: "I know, I'm just — I was like, yes, yes, yes, this is so good. Because people don't realize that when your back is against the wall, you're actually going to become a lot more creative. I absolutely love that. And I also love — you talked about being relentless, but also patient, and I think that's such a beautiful thing to say. Because I'm, in general, a very impatient creature. But when you start something, or in anything in your career really, you're going to have to have both."

Christina Tosi: "Yeah. It doesn't mean you're going to procrastinate. You're going to hustle, hustle, hustle. But you also need to understand that some things will take time, and will take some maturing to do."

Ilana Golan: "I just love that. I was like, yes, yes — both are important. Discomfort and comfort. Get comfortable being uncomfortable."

Christina Tosi: "This is the spirit of the last 18 years of Milk Bar. Love the discomfort. Love it. The tensions — you are on your path, and it feels like you're constantly up against two opposing forces. That means you're doing it right."

Ilana Golan: "Christina, just two more questions. Do you think there's something that people maybe don't know about you that created the Christina that we see today?"

Christina Tosi: "It's such a good question. I'm a very yielding, rule-following person everywhere — but I'm not in the kitchen. That's something that at an early age I found was my space and my comfort to break the rules. I'm trying to think — maybe that's obvious. I'm trying to figure out what the layers deeper on that are. I'm relentless. I'm an obsessive. I will — I have three different recipes happening just over here that you can't see, and I will go at them until the middle of the night tonight, early into tomorrow, until I get them done, because I don't like not knowing. I don't like the unresolved, and I'm relentless at it. I'm impatient, just like you, Ilana. And when there are things specifically like food in the kitchen — things that I need resolved — I don't like something on my to-do list, I don't like something unresolved, I need to know. It's a little bit like the mathematician in me. I need to know I can solve the problem — the ratios of things, the time, the temperature, how long am I mixing, whatever it is. And I won't sleep at night."

Ilana Golan: "Do you know your why? Why is it such a drive? Do you know?"

Christina Tosi: "It's somewhere in between. I don't like things unresolved. I don't like things on the to-do list. I don't like feeling like someone is waiting for me to deliver. I don't like feeling like I'm slowing someone down. But I think, for me, ultimately — because this is a recipe, I don't owe it to anyone, it's just for me, I'm developing it for Bake Club — I need to know, I need to be able to solve the math problem and check my work. And the part of the intersection of eating and math is: there is no key. X doesn't equal anything — I say what X equals. But until it's right, until I can bring the idea in my head of nostalgia, what I think it's going to taste like, the texture, the size, the shape, how I think it's all going to balance out — until I know I can solve that formula in a real bite, it'll keep me up at night. Of all the things that will keep me up at night — there are a few others in life — but that's a big one. I won't go to bed until I am done with the recipe. Which is a dangerous thing. One, because I'm like, 'I'll be there for dinner,' but I'm just sitting at the dinner table waiting for everyone to get up so I can finish my recipe *[laughter]* — and I don't know how long it's going to be. And there's a dangerous amount of failed baked goods on the counter. I'm trying to think of what else. I'm relentless. I'm impatient. If I don't have it solved, I will go at it forever. And yet I'm the most optimistic and the most pessimistic person at the same time. It's, to the tensions point — and I love that, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't know why that is. It's just how I'm built, and I don't feel like I need to explain it to anyone. I just know that that's my process."

Ilana Golan: "It's you. This is you. And what would you wish somebody told you — maybe you talk to your younger self, when you're still lost or still trying to figure this out. What would you wish somebody told you, or that you could go back and tell yourself?"

Christina Tosi: "I think, more than anything — I wouldn't want any answers. On those dark days, or those moments where I felt uncertain or lost — I don't really have memory of that. But I think the number-one thing, when I talk about what it took to get to where I am, is: it all makes sense in the end. I'm not done, I'm not at the end. I'm just to where I am in the marathon. But it all makes sense. It's not supposed to be a straight line. You don't have to make excuses, or give a reason, for what makes sense to you. And it will all add up. It all adds up. When I think about — we have, whatever it is, seven, eight, nine cookbooks — I would not know how to write recipes, how to photograph recipes, if I didn't try all these other things on for size. I wouldn't know how to run a business if I didn't fall in love with math and really give myself to majoring in math. Every day, I have these little brief moments in life where I go, 'Holy smokes, I've been training for this moment my entire life.' And I can't wait to figure out what it is tomorrow that I learn, that dots this sort of crooked path from way back when. If you follow what makes sense to you — it doesn't need to make sense to anyone else. I would dare say it shouldn't make sense to anyone else. If you keep following what feels right to you, it will add up. And I think my best advice to myself and to anyone else is: you don't have to have all the answers. You do not have to have all the answers. You are exactly where you're supposed to be. The thing you owe to yourself is to pay attention. You have to start paying attention to the things that make you curious, that magnetize you, that draw you in, that make you feel alive. Pay attention to those, and start trying them on for size. Start going at them. The only thing about them that makes sense is that they are true for you, that they make you feel something. Go at them, pick them up. Maybe something doesn't work — put it down, pick something else up. It's all going to make sense eventually. And the little moments make sense right now."

Ilana Golan, host of the Leap Academy Podcast: "So powerful, Christina. Oh my god, I love this conversation. So, where do they find Milk Bar and buy it — for all their friends, for themselves, for you? How do they find you? You're the best."

Christina Tosi: "So, milkbarstore.com is where we'll ship baked goods all across the country for you. You can also find where our stores are at milkbarstore.com. We're in New York, LA, Las Vegas, Chicago, Washington, DC, and more coming soon. And you can find us on all the socials at MilkBarStore and Bake Club. Don't forget Bake Club — come in, bake a batch with me. We'd love to have you. So fun."

Ilana Golan, host of the Leap Academy Podcast: "So fun. Christina, thanks for coming to the show. This was so fun. I could probably grill you forever, but this was so fun."

Christina Tosi: "I love it. Ilana, thank you so much for what you've built, how you show up, the way in which you just get it. And thanks for having me."

Ilana Golan, host of the Leap Academy Podcast: "Ah, it's so fun. Thank you."