Pizza and sushi (E)

0:00Enriched flour, wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine, mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid, water, low moisture, part skim, mozzarella cheese, cultured, pasteurized, part skim milk, salt enzymes, tomato paste, yeast, contains 2 % or less of palm oil, sugar, vegetable oil, soybean, and or canola oil, salt, modified food starch, spice, maltodextrin, hydrolyzed soy and corn. I could go on forever. Konnichiwa. It's Nick in Fukuoka, Japan, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:51Those were some of the ingredients in Tony's pizzeria-style all-natural frozen pizza. In New York City, by some measures, the home of pizza in the United States, there are more than 2 ,000 pizza places. And in the United States, more than 76 ,000 places to buy a fresh-made hot pizza. And almost all of it is terrible. and consider for a moment sushi, a food with a supply chain that could not be more different than that of pizza, a food made in many places by hunting a nearly extinct wild animal and then combining it with a warm substance, rice, and perhaps putting it in a refrigerator. most sushi places are terrible.

2:02How is it that the two foods that can please any gathering of people, the two foods that people will go back for at a buffet, if they're great, are often so terrible? Well, let's begin with this, an axiom, a true rule. The pizza you grew up with is the pizza you love. And there are some studies that have been done about this, about lots of things having to do with food. Turns out that kids who grew up in India eating spicy Indian food like spicy Indian food, the food you grow up with is the food you love. Well, people, it's funny. People come to Buffalo and they say there's a couple of things they have to have that reminds them of Buffalo.

2:49And Bachi's pizza is one of them. They get off the plane, they say they gotta come. And people say it's, some people say it's the sweet sauce. Some people say it's the burnt pepperoni. Everybody has their taste buds, what they remember, what they like about it. And it's a different style of pizza. It's Neapolitan. It's not your thin crust New York City style pizza, or it's not your real thick Sicilian style pizza. It's like in between. And I think generally people remember it growing up, and that's who they have a love for it. And pizza? Well, here's the thing. Lots of people in the United States grew up in the suburbs.

3:24and their parents, perhaps holding their nose, perhaps simply harried and too busy, brought in mediocre pizza. They took their kids to Shakey's or to Pizza Hut or they bought a frozen pizza and served it to their kids because it's simple, because it's easy and it becomes the pizza you grew up with. Of course, a big exception here for Bocce Pizza in Buffalo, New York, the pizza I grew up with. Because, of course, the pizza you grew up with is the pizza you love. And don't start criticizing Bocce Pizza. But leaving aside the sweet sauce, here's what we know. Most pizza is mediocre. And the reason it's mediocre is because it's the pizza you grew up with.

4:17It's something we may never recover from. But consider Dom DiMarco. I got a lot of people from Europe, you see, when they come in the city, they come over here because they hear about this pizzeria. But it's funny because this pizza is much better than the one they make over there. But whatever I use comes from over there. I don't know why they don't make it right. When I buy tomato, flour, or mozzarella, I look at the type of price. It's very important. I like to touch the dough. I like to feel the dough, you know. Some people, they make a lousy pizza, you know. They attract the people, they throw up on it, you know.

5:04It's not necessary. It's just like a show. Show off, you know. Dom DiMarco, the patriarch of DeFarra's pizza, can take up to three minutes to make one pie, painstakingly stretching it edge to edge before putting it in the oven. And so people will wait in line for an hour or two hours to get a slice of pizza made by hand by Dom DiMarco. They're not waiting in line because there are no pizza alternatives. They're not waiting in line because it is the cheapest or most convenient alternative. They're waiting in line because Dom DiMarco got out of the way. He got out of the way of the simple ingredients he was using.

5:52And all he added was care. Or consider Maria, who was the owner of Johnny's Pizza, who ran the place for 40 years. She understood Godin's first law of pizza quality, which is that in general, the quality of the pizza in a pizza place is inversely proportional to how nice they are to the typical outsider. So if you called Johnny's on a Sunday to order a pizza, the phone would ring and ring and ring. No answering machine. Why? they weren't out of business. It's just that they were closed on Sunday. And if you didn't know that, well, tough on you. Listen to the phone ring. And for all the years that we lived in Mount Vernon, or at least for the first five, we would call Johnny's Pizza to order a pie.

6:51And 20 minutes later, we would show up to pick it up. And as we walked in the door, they would put the pizza in the oven. They did this for two reasons. One, One, they didn't want their pizza to wait for us. They wanted us to wait for their pizza. And two, Maria didn't trust us. Once upon a time, someone ordered a pizza and didn't pick it up. And so, if you're not family and you're ordering a pizza, you will wait for it. Unfortunately, Maria was killed in a tragic car accident a few months ago. And Johnny's went away. because, like sushi, pizza, good pizza, is personal. It is not an industrial activity.

7:37It is an activity where the effort and care of the person who makes it is directly related to how good it is. Some people will tell you that you can't make good pizza outside of New Haven or New York because of the water, that somehow the water makes a difference. Some people will tell you that you can't make good pizza without coal in the oven. Others will say, no, it has to be cherry or other hardwoods, a fire built inside a ceramic cave in which you're going to make your pizza. How then to explain Chris Bianco, who figured out how to make pizza in Arizona. For me, I just look at things that make sense to me.

8:27There's no gospel here other than my own to myself. I think that was the one thing about pizza. Starting out, there was a lot of religion of, you never do this, you always do that. And I'm like, hey man, if you dig it, do it. How then to explain Dom DiMarco? Dom showed everyone every single ingredient he uses, which brand of flour, which brand of tomato sauce. And he made his pizzas in the standard electric or gas pizza oven. So what's going on here if it's not a secret? The secret is there's no secret. Well, one thing we learned from Jim Leahy, who pioneered the overnight Sullivan Street dough, is that the convenient way to make pizza is the wrong way to make pizza.

9:18The convenient way to make pizza is to use stabilizers, special cheese that's easy to cook, and most of all, a bunch of yeast so that you can start the dough at noon and be baking by 2 p.m. That's not what Jim does. Jim puts the tiniest little thumbful of yeast into a really big vat of flour and water, and then he lets it sit for 15 hours. 15 hours is an incredibly inconvenient way to make the dough for a pizza you're going to sell for$10. Convenience, it turns out, is the enemy of pizza quality. Now let's think for a second about why it's so easy to find sushi that doesn't make you sick. Because 15, 20, 25 years ago, you took a risk if you had fresh fish sushi prepared by someone who didn't care or didn't know what they were doing.

10:22They figured out that they could freeze tuna and other fish to 60 degrees Celsius below zero, as solid as a piece of wood, and that if it is defrosted properly, it tastes pretty good for convenient sushi. They figured out that they could train a robot to roll the rice pretty much the way a pretty good sushi chef might do it. They figured out that if you made a bunch of sushi in advance, you could keep it in the cooler at Whole Foods and it wouldn't make anybody sick. That by averaging it out and averaging it out and averaging it out, sushi has become convenient.

11:24And buying pizza in the freezer section of your local grocer is convenient. When I was growing up, a babysitter watched us when our parents went away. I must have been eight. My sister was six. My other sister was three or four. And the person who was taking care of us bought us pizza rolls at the supermarket. And she cooked them at two o 'clock in the afternoon and served them for dinner at 6 p.m. Cold pizza rolls. Not bodgie pizza. Pizza rolls from the freezer. Well, we did what any self-respecting group of three kids would do. We called the healthmans across the street and asked them to rescue us.

12:06So they came over and they fired the woman and took us into their house till my parents got back from wherever they'd been. Because convenience isn't the point. If you're willing to walk away from a good piece of pizza just to save five minutes, what else are you willing to walk away from? So here's the lesson. The lesson is A, there is in fact an absolute scale of pizza quality. Good pizza, regardless of where you grew up, is better than bad pizza. That pizza made in an inconvenient way by someone who cares is better than lazy pizza. And the second rule? The second rule is understood if you think about Narita Airport in Tokyo.

13:01Narita Airport, somewhere between gate 30 and gate 33, is proof that my rule about never eat sushi in the airport has an exception. And the exception is that at that little corner of Narita Airport, there's someone who cares. He will not make you sushi while you are holding your suitcase racing for a plane. But if you put your suitcases down and go sit in the corner, someone will come and talk to you, look you in the eye, and ask you what you want to eat. And then a different human, a human who cares, a human who has trained for years, spending two years, three years, just to learn to make rice, will make you some sushi.

13:50And they will bring you that sushi, not with the artificial green stuff that so many Americans think is wasabi, but it's really horseradish, but real wasabi, which is incredibly inconvenient and difficult for them to obtain and to serve you. And then they will serve you this food, and if you know what you are eating, you will realize you are in the presence of something inconvenient, something worthwhile. And the one time that I was there, when I left, I stopped and I apologized to the people behind the counter. I apologized to them on behalf of my countrymen who were dumping soy sauce all over the product that they were served.

14:39Yes, I wish they didn't serve tuna there. Yes, I wish they had more vegetables to choose from. But that's not my point. My point is that when we are willing to do something inconvenient, we will discover that maybe we did something worth arguing about, something worth crossing the street for, something worth posting about, talking about, and deciding to make even better. But what it means to make it better is not that we got a robot to make it faster, not that we found some calcium proponate so we could make it cheaper, not so that we could add more yeast so we would have more flexibility and not to use a rice cooker even though it's pretty good and convenient.

15:31But instead, maybe, just maybe, we could decide there are some things in our life that are worth doing the difficult way, the inconvenient way, because they're better. Thanks for listening. Hey Seth, it's Maria Hey Seth, my name's Kyle Greetings Seth, this is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here Hi Seth, this is Anupam Hi, this is Caitlin Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Hey Seth, this is Rex Hey Seth Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece Hi, this is Roberta Perry My question is And that completes my question I love to hear your questions thank you for being generous enough to contribute them.

16:18If you've got a question about this episode or something from a prior week, please drop by akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button. Hey Seth, this is Joey. I loved the show last week, and I've always thought that if I practiced math like I did, music or even a language, that eventually I could come to a feel for the numbers rather than having to learn all these things that don't make sense. The feeling is where it starts. And so I was wondering how you approach or would suggest we all learn to feel the solutions that are true, not what we think are true, whether that's science or something like creativity.

17:11Thank you so much for your work. Really excited to hear the next episode. Thank you, Joey. You hit the nail on the head. It turns out that music is a game, that you can take all the music theory classes you want. You're not going to be able to sit down at the piano and play something original and beautiful the first time. Music is a game because it has rules, it has choices, and it has outcomes. Games, things we can play again and again, push us to internalize how we go about making the choices. We're not using a formula. We're thinking about it with a mindfulness that allows us to be present and figure it out internally.

17:56We call that art sometimes. Well, there are lots of games that are played with numbers. If you and your seven-year-old sit down to play the game of NIMH with 21 matches, take one, two, or three matches per turn, a person who is forced to take the last match loses, you will quickly start to think about numbers a little bit differently. If you play the game enough times, you'll be able to figure out how to win or not win based on who goes first. So lots of kids play tic-tac-toe or NIMH when they're really little, but then all of a sudden, we start pushing kids to memorize the formula instead of playing another game.

18:45Games can get really complicated. The people who run hedge funds are playing games all the time with complicated math and really big stakes. I'm not proposing that you become a day trader. What I'm saying is that with numbers, more than almost any other field, there are plenty of games to play. Games where it doesn't necessarily look like we're playing with math, but we are. hi Seth this is Andy I just woke up and I'm watching your creative mornings talk which is wonderful and I listened to the podcast about cash flow and I'm facing a decision in my life to do something scary and leap out on a limb and try to commit myself more full-time than I would be comfortable with doing something creative work that matters and i'm not sure um i don't have much money in the bank um and i'm wondering how would you recommend being risky or not i'm not sure if i should take another job and try to do this on the side again I just hate that.

20:09And I'd like to just kind of go for it, but I feel like that might be folly. So a lot of people kind of question my decision to drive Uber because it's flexible and pay the bills that way while working. And I'm personally fine with that, but it does seem like potentially my long-term prospects are decreasing if I fail. So I guess, yeah, how risky would you be in terms of finances and going out on a limb to fight the resistance and do the thing that you believe will succeed? Thank you, Andy, for this question. There's a lot to it. So let's try to break it into little bits in no particular order.

20:59The first part is the idea, as you understand, of cash flow, of being able to stay in the game. The thing is, we have to work. Human beings have had to work as long as there have been human beings. We work to create value so we can get resources so we can survive. Work is not guaranteed to be fun. Work is not guaranteed to be art. if we're lucky, if we're fortunate, if we plan, we may be able to find work where we get paid to create something that we are proud of, to make a difference, to do our art. But it's not a guarantee. So I begin with this. You get to keep playing the game as long as you keep having enough money to play the game.

21:48And so this idea of risk, of getting kicked out of the game, of running out, of getting deep into debt, some people see that as fuel. And if you are one of those people who needs to feel like all the chips are on black 42, well then you know what you need to do. But for the rest of us, the idea of being able to continue playing the game is more important than feeling what feels like existential risk. So if you're asking what I would do, what I would do is realize that even after work, you have six or seven or eight hours a day, plus weekends, to do your art. And if you can do your art without the pressure of knowing you need to do it to make the rent, it's entirely possible your art will be more generous, more heartfelt, more magical.

22:46That ironically, the less you need your art to make money, the more it's possible that your art will make money. But you also inserted the question of what other people might think, what they might think if you're driving Uber, what they might think if you do it full time, what they might think if you stop doing it. And I think it's a mistake to wonder about what other people will think. Because first of all, we never really know what they think. We just know what they say. And often what they say, they think they're saying on our behalf. They are worried about us. So they encourage us to not reach or stretch because they don't want to be responsible for us falling down.

23:30If for a minute you cannot worry about those people and instead worry about those you seek to serve, about what value you can create for them in the time that's allotted. Because there's only 168 hours in a week and we're asleep for a big chunk of that. So everyone gets a set of hours to spend. It's not clear to me that expanding that set of hours and quitting your job just because your job feels like work is the best way to do the art that you seek to do. And the last part, and the reason that I wanted to give an extended answer to this question, is we get to choose the creative work we're going to do.

24:16We get to choose which audience we seek to serve. And Pressfield's resistance would remind us that picking a group that's too big, an art that's too audacious, is just as much hiding as picking one that's too small and one that's too safe. because if you pick something that's too big that you will never, ever be expected to accomplish it, well, you just found yourself a safe place to hide. So the advice that I give to people, the advice I give to myself, is to find the smallest viable audience. Viable, meaning it's worth your effort. Viable, meaning it can repay you for what you put into it. but small, not huge, not large, not I'm going to win a Pulitzer Prize, not I'm going to go on a 40-city tour with my rock group and also be a really talented stay-at-home mom.

25:14It's very difficult to do both of those at the same time. And so we have to have priorities. All of us do. There is no one who lives without boundaries of time and space and physics and capital. So within those boundaries, constraints, how can you use those constraints to fuel your art, to be able to say at the end of the day, I had three hours to spend, to invest, to commit today to my art. And look at what I made. Look at this difference that I created. Could I have created more of a difference in nine or ten hours? Maybe. but let's get really good at three hours. So good at it that people are paying me to do it more.

26:05That's how we can back our way into the lifestyle that you're talking about, being full-time at the work that we seek to do. We begin by doing it for a few, doing it so well, so uniquely us, that the people we serve demand that we do it more. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.