Something You Should Know - How Changing Your Expectations Can Change Your Life & The Story of Pizza

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

Ever had something go “down the wrong pipe” while you were eating and you started choking? Why does that happen? Is it dangerous? This episode begins with an explanation. https://bottomlineinc.com/health/diseases-conditions/down-the-wrong-hatch What you expect to happen in your life has a great deal to do with how things turn out. Whether it is your health, happiness, body weight, even how long you live, your expectations determine the outcome to a large degree. That’s according to award winning science writer David Robson who has explored the science of expectations and is author of the book The Expectation Effect (https://amzn.to/3KfXZKR). Listen as he explains how having positive expectations can make your life so much better.  When and where was the first pizza made? Why can’t anyone make a decent frozen pizza? What ever happened to Godfather’s Pizza - Round Table? These are just a few of the questions I explore with food writer Mark Masker author of the book Totally Pizza: The Wild Story of the World’s Most Famous Food. (https://amzn.to/3712smr). Probably since the invention of the classroom, students have been reprimanded for doodling. The assumption is that if you are doodling, you are not paying attention. Listen as I explain how that is completely inaccurate https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090226210039.htm# PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! We really like The Jordan Harbinger Show! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!  Go to https://Indeed.com/Something to claim your $75 credit before March 31st! Sign up for your FREE Novo business checking account RIGHT NOW at https://Novo.co/Something and you'll get access to over $5,000 in perks and discounts! With Avast One, https://avast.com you can confidently take control of your online world without worrying about viruses, phishing attacks, ransomware, hacking attempts, & other cybercrimes! Discover matches all the cash back you’ve earned at the end of your first year! Learn more at https://discover.com/match Put down your phone when you drive! . Remember U Drive. U Text. U Pay. Brought to you by NHTSA.   Use SheetzGo on the Sheetz app! Just open the app, scan your snacks, tap your payment method and go!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, did you know if you eat the wrong way, it could kill you? Then how changing your expectations can change your life from your health, your happiness, even how you age. For instance, in one study, the people who had the more positive expectations of aging

lived for seven and a half years longer than those who had the negative expectations. If we discovered a virus that was reducing people's lifespans by this amount, we would instantly be looking for a cure. Also, why doodling when other people are talking is a good thing. And everything you wanted to know about pizza, like why frozen pizza has mostly been a disappointment. With pizza, the issue has always been the crust. Flash freezing the crust, it doesn't rise right. It wasn't until we got a decent one when Kraft came out with DiGiorno pizza in 1995. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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I've already done the interview. It's so interesting. He's a doctor, and he's basically going to take us on a tour of the human body. And one of the things he talks about is how in the throat we each have two pipes. One is for air, and one is for food and liquid. And it is just an amazing thing about the human body

that they're so close together, and we have somehow mastered, for the most part, how food goes down the food pipe and air goes down the air pipe. And when it does go wrong, you know it, because you start choking and coughing, and someone says, oh, did it go down the wrong pipe? Well, when that happens, it's more than annoying. It's dangerous. Aspirating food or liquids can actually cause pneumonia if it gets inhaled into the lungs.

Popcorn and peanuts are popular triggers because we tend to toss them towards the back of our mouth when we eat them. Here are some other eating hazards to avoid that can cause the problem. Eating too fast, talking while eating, or eating while you are reclined. All of that can cause the food or drink to go down the wrong pipe and you start choking. If you're using a straw, put it to one side of your mouth to avoid that jet stream of liquid to the back of your throat, because that can cause trouble too. And that is something you should know. It is such a simple statement, a simple idea, but it can alter your life when you hear it. And the idea is that much of what happens to you is the result of what you expect to happen. That what you think about yourself, your life, your situation, your

happiness, your success, so many things are the result of your beliefs to some degree. It's not like if you believe you should be rich, then a pile of money just shows up at your door. It doesn't work like that. But the science of expectations does work in a way you probably never knew. Here to explain how it works and how you can use it to your advantage is Dave Robson. Dave is an award-winning science writer specializing in psychology and neuroscience. His work has appeared in The Atlantic and Men's Health, among other places.

And he has a book out called The Expectation Effect, How Your Mindset Can Change Your World. Hi David, welcome. It's completely my pleasure, thanks for having me. So explain, just in broad strokes to start here, explain what the expectation effect is. Right, so the expectation effect describes these phenomena where our beliefs create these self-fulfilling prophecies. And that can happen through three separate mechanisms, through changes to your behavior, to your perception, and to your physiology. So things like the balance of hormones. And this is really important because it influences how we respond to

medical treatments. It changes the way we respond to things like a new workout, to exercise regimes, to our diet, to sleep loss. It can even shape how quickly we age and ultimately our longevity. So almost every area of our lives are influenced by the expectation effect. One might think, based on what you just said, is that this is part of that whole idea. And there are plenty of gurus who will talk about, you know, if you believe it, you can achieve it, that if you imagine it to be that it will somehow magically happen to you. And the world is full of disappointed people who bought into that and, you know, nothing ever happens.

Yeah, I mean, this is very different from that kind of cliched view of positive thinking where you kind of set your expectations unreasonably high. So, you know, you imagine that you're like an Olympic athlete or that you imagine money kind of just coming to you mysteriously. And this is very much evidence-based. You know, I cite 450 scientific peer-reviewed papers, and it's very much looking at specific expectations in specific circumstances, and they have specific effects. And I can give you lots of examples, but, yeah, this is absolutely based on good scientific evidence,

and it's not about kind of imagining the impossible. It's really about just resetting our expectations in very realistic, you know, objective ways, in fact. One of the best examples, I think, that explains what you're talking about is the expectation about sleep loss, what sleep loss does to you. So let's start with that one, because I think it sets the stage for what we're about to talk about after that. So what the research has shown is that chronic sleep loss and insomnia is bad for your health. But actually, lots of people catastrophize even small amounts of sleep loss, even when it's not a kind of long term problem. So you have one disturbed night, and you assume that, you know, because of that small

amount of sleep loss, that you're just not going to be able to function the next day, you're going to be in a bad mood, you're going to not be able to concentrate, you're going to feel fatigued, you know, it just goes on and on. What the research shows is that actually, those symptoms that people are feeling are almost completely the product of their expectations and the fact that they are catastrophizing, you know, their broken, disrupted sleep. So, I just find that really useful. And it's really something that I think a lot of my friends and colleagues, you know, have taken away from my book and found really helpful. Oh, I think that's so interesting. How many times have people said, oh, I'm so tired. I didn't sleep

well last night. It's just ruined the whole day. And I can't think and I can't do anything. And they're just convincing themselves of that. Absolutely. And what said the research describes kind of two different types of people. You have the complaining good sleepers. So these are people who might get seven hours of sleep a night. But, you know, if they wake up for like 20 minutes in that night, they assume that they're going to have really, you know, bad symptoms of

insomnia the next day. And then you have the non-complaining bad sleepers. So people who do have really disrupted nights, but they just don't complain about it. They just try to focus on the sleep they did get rather than the sleep they didn't get. And what you find is that it's those expectations that completely determine their behavior and their functioning the next day. The other example that I found really interesting that I'd like to get you to talk about is the idea of what stress does to people and people's expectation of the effects of stress. So most people, I think, in the West have this idea that stress is inherently debilitating and kind of dangerous. What the scientific research shows is

that stress and anxiety can be debilitating, but also actually in the right kind of quantities, you know, not chronic stress, but definitely in short-term situations, actually they can be really helpful. They can be sources of energy. And the difference between whether you find it anxiety enhancing or debilitating depends on your mindset and how you view that stress. It's very much about your interpretation of the stress. So what the scientists have done to prove this is that they would kind of put people in, you know, anxiety-inducing situations, things like taking a difficult exam or doing public speaking. And beforehand, they would just ask them to reappraise the feelings, so not suppress the feelings of anxiety, but just help to see them

as something that could be potentially useful. So they told them, for example, that when the heart is racing, that's actually pumping lots of oxygenated blood to your brain, and that the hormone cortisol in moderate quantities, it actually sharpens your thinking, it keeps you on the ball. What they found was that just providing that information improved these people's performance. So they were using their anxiety to their advantage. And that's indeed what they found in separate longitudinal studies. They found that people who have positive interpretations of stress and anxiety, they're actually just less likely to suffer from burnout and some physical health problems too, like cardiovascular disease. Can we talk about goals? Because I think there are a lot of people

who might be listening to this saying, look, I've had, you know, goals and I've had a very, you know, positive, I really want to achieve this, but I never did. So was I doing something wrong? Or not everybody achieves their goals, even with a positive mindset. So how big a deal is that mindset in achieving goals? I think we have to be really honest here is that the mindset alone is not going to work miracles. So you can have the positive mindset. And I think what that does is it does help you to release your own natural potential. So I think when we have overly negative interpretations of our abilities, that's going to make everything

harder. So if you see yourself as not being very fit, not being naturally kind of predisposed to exercise, the science shows that is going to then make all of your workouts much harder. So you're going to find it difficult to make the kind of gains that you might want to achieve if you also simultaneously believe you're not so capable. But simply having the positive mindset and the positive expectations, that can't make up for all of the work you need to do at the gym. And also, it can't just make up for like all of the kind of random things that happen in our lives that might prevent us from achieving our goals, you know, like a lot of success does depend to a certain extent on kind of chance as well. So I would say having a positive mindset can definitely make it much

easier for you to see improvements in your performance in lots of different areas. But it's no guarantee that you're going to become like an Olympic gold winner, you know. It all depends really on, it's one big part, an important part of the kind of puzzle of what makes some people successful. But it certainly isn't the only explanation. But if you don't have a positive mindset, if, as you say, like you, you're a pessimist, is it as easy as saying, well, in this particular case, I'm going to change my mindset, I'm going to change my attitude towards this? Or do you have to change your whole being? I think for lots of people who are pessimists, like it's enough to just try to be open-minded about your assumptions. So say like with the example of kind of anxiety

and reinterpreting anxiety that I mentioned, you know, just kind of opening yourself up to this possibility that anxiety might be beneficial in some way, you know, that can lead you to kind of these immediate improvements. And that's what the research shows. And that's what my own personal experience kind of showed was that actually, you know, when I was doing public speaking, and I reframed this stress in this way, it did actually feel a lot easier. My performance did increase. It didn't turn me into this amazingly charismatic speaker overnight, but I think I saw an incremental change. And then by seeing that incremental change, I'd kind of proven to myself that it was useful. And so I could build on that the next time I had to do the positive speaking.

So there was a kind of trajectory, I would say, small steps that ultimately led me to feel a lot more confident when I was standing on the stage. Let's drill down a little into the exercise one that you, the exercise example that you mentioned because people who have exercised hard know that it's painful, it hurts, it's not comfortable, it's not fun until it's over. Then it maybe it feels pretty good. But how do you, how do you make that experience not what it apparently is, which is miserable? You know, it's funny that you say it's miserable, because I have to say, I used to find it agonizing and horrible before I started changing my mindset. And then even during the workout, I do enjoy the discomfort to a certain extent. So, you know, I do think the mindset can actually have kind of these benefits, like while you're doing the exercise, as unbelievable as that could seem. But I would say that for me and, you know, according to the research, it's all about how you interpret the sensations as you're doing the exercise.

And I think for lots of people who, you know, naturally maybe don't feel like they're so good at exercising, you know, they just they have these more negative associations with exercise. I think it's very easy for us to catastrophize all the feelings that we might be having when we're on the treadmill. So, you know, if your heart is racing and you're feeling out of breath, it's very easy to see that as a sign of your kind of physical failure. You know, like my partner who really doesn't like exercising, he actually, you know, often at that point, he's like telling himself, oh God, like I'm just so unfair, I'm never going to get fitter again. That's the kind of expectation effect you don't want to be having. And actually, you can easily reframe those feelings by telling yourself, and it's totally true and scientifically

valid, is that actually, you know, that you've reached the kind of optimum point of your exercise when you are feeling that kind of physical strain. So help me understand, because you said that you used to look at exercise the way many people do, and now you don't. So what did you do? How did you make this transformation other than to just think it? What really changed it for me actually was learning about this study from Stanford University where they invited participants to come into the lab and they gave them a genetic test first. It looked at the CREB1 gene, which is known to be associated with endurance exercise.

People who have the kind of negative variant of that tend to feel hotter, and they have a higher body temperature as they exercise, and they have lower endurance, and they just seem to find the experience a bit more uncomfortable. People with the positive gene are the kind of total opposite, you know, they just find it a bit easier. So they gave the people the genetic test, but then they gave them sham feedback. So the people who had the positive version of the gene might be told they had the negative one and vice versa. And what they found was that those expectations alone had a really big impact on how these people performed during the endurance exercise. So it changed not only the actual total endurance, like how long they could stay running on the treadmill. It also changed things like how effective their lungs were, how efficient they were, kind of exchanging oxygen for

carbon dioxide. So, you know, really profound. And even more importantly, those expectations, in many of these cases, and many of the things that they were measuring, were actually more important than the gene itself. I'm speaking with Dave Robson. He is author of the book, The Expectation Effect, How Your Mindset Can Change Your World. People who listen to something you should know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared.

It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars.

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you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices,

and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named the Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So David, I wonder how this applies to, you know, those people who say, I'm no good with names, I'm terrible with directions, that these are the negative versions of what you're talking about. If you believe you're no good with names, and you believe your sense of direction is terrible, seems like that that's

probably what's going to happen. That's totally true. And actually, the reasons for that, they kind of appeals to kind of two of those mechanisms that I spoke about. I think the first is that actually, it is going to change the way your brain is processing the information. And that's partly because if you feel you're really bad at remembering names or kind of finding your way, they actually, whenever you're in that situation, you're going to suffer from greater anxiety about your abilities. And that anxiety can just be a big mental distraction. So it's really changing the way that you actually, you know, it's reducing your mental

capacity, basically, because of that anxiety. But I think also it's going to change your behavior in the long term. If you just assume you can't remember names or you can't kind of find your way, you're just not going to try. So you're not exercising those parts of the brain so that overall you're not really building that mental muscle that would in time allow you to actually do those things. You're just kind of giving up too early. One area that people set goals and often fail is losing weight it's just it's just so common it's an epidemic in western countries that people are overweight they set they try to lose weight come new year's eve they set their resolution and a few months later they say i i

can't do this uh i'm not made for this. I'm just going to be fat. And so actually, I've looked at kind of the kind of dieting paradox from two different angles. One, I think actually, a lot of us just even if we go on diets, a bit like we've kind of our attitudes to exercise, we just assume maybe that we're just not cut out for losing weight, we might assume, you know, we have a slow metabolism that's just going to make it harder to lose weight. The same team at Stanford, who had also looked at our expectations of exercise, they also looked at these specific expectations of whether people believed that they had a kind of genetic predisposition to obesity or not. And once again, they found that actually those expectations shaped things like how their

body responded to a meal. So if you assume that because of your genes, you're just naturally going to have a greater appetite, well, after eating a meal, these people did have a greater appetite. And not only that, but they were also expressing higher levels of certain kind of gut hormones that would create the greater appetite. So, you know, physiologically, it was true. Also, perceptually, it became true. It became this self-fulfilling prophecy. So that's one thing I think, actually, we should just reassess our assumptions about whether we, you know, whether there's any good reason for us to believe that we're naturally predisposed to being overweight or obese, or whether actually that's just something that we've grown up kind of assuming to be true when it's not. Something I think is really important to understand that you talk about, important for parents and students, is your expectations in education, your expectations of what you can grasp and learn and understand.

The study that really stuck out for me was actually looking at kind of brain training apps. You know, there'd been loads of these studies looking at these apps you might have on your phone or computer, but claimed that they could raise your intelligence. And in lots of cases, it seemed like the apps actually could do that. But the research hadn't really looked at whether people's expectations were playing a role in that. And so what this researcher did was he just gave people these brain training games, but he kind of presented them differently to the participants. So for some, they were just presented as a fairly boring exercise. For the others, you know, he really emphasised the fact that you will be more intelligent after you do this hour-long training session. And he gave them intelligence tests before and afterwards. And what he found was that the brain training really did improve people's intelligence by about five IQ points, you know, it's a

significant amount, but only if they had the positive expectation that it would be beneficial. And so there's lots of other research on this, you know, looking at how our expectations can shape our creativity. You know, they told participants that say, smelling a certain smell, I think it was mint or cardamom, that that had been shown to improve creativity. And, you know, after being given this kind of placebo treatment, the participants did actually show themselves to be better original thinkers. In your research, you uncovered information about frustration and how we interpret frustration when we encounter it. And I thought this was really interesting.

So talk about that. If we feel frustrated at school or, you know, in professional training, we can feel that that's actually a sign that we're just no good at the task at hand. Again, it's a sign of kind of our innate inability. What the researchers did was they just told people, actually, you can just reinterpret the frustration as a sign that you're learning. Like no kind of great leaps in learning are made without some frustration. It's actually a sign that your brain is working really hard.

And then once it's put all the pieces together, you'll get that aha moment that's really pleasurable. But the frustration itself is essential to being able to reach that insight. And they found that this could be really helpful with students, you know, learning new tasks, performing kind of memory tests, you know, even it could change the way that they kind of studied over the course of a year to actually improve their results at the end of the year. So it had long-term consequences. Again, it's not kind of being deceptive, it's just learning to change your interpretation and expectation of what could be an uncomfortable situation. When you're sick, your expectations of your illness and your recovery, I mean, you can't think yourself better, but how you expect to get better can have a real impact, right? What the research shows is that if you have

negative expectations of your symptoms, if you assume that they're going to get worse, and you're fearful of those symptoms, then actually it can often exacerbate those symptoms. So things like pain, I mean, pain's the main one, really, whatever pain you're feeling, if you start to feel anxious about that pain, and you start to kind of believing that it's never going to get better, that that in itself will really heighten the amount of pain you're feeling and prolong how much pain you're feeling. So if you have positive expectations of your recovery, if you feel that you're being cared for and that your body is capable of recovering, that in itself can reduce things like the inflammation within the body. We know that inflammation can kind of slow recovery, slow healing of the body. And it also

just makes us feel really ill, like a lot of that kind of lethargy that we feel when we're ill, that's caused by inflammation. I would imagine that this applies to people as they age and your outlook on what it means to get older. You know, there's always those people that will complain about how getting old is horrible and all the aches and pains. And if you buy into that, I would imagine that getting old is horrible. Yeah, I mean, this is like a huge area of research. And it's really actually the research that just completely blew my mind when I came across it. So it started in 2002 with

this big longitudinal study by Becca Levy at Yale University. She had kind of used this data, and it had really tracked people's health across their lives. And in the kind of midlife or just before, it had asked people, what do you expect ageing? Do you expect your life to get better, to stay the same or to get worse as you get older? And then she found that those expectations of how their lives would change as they got older actually predicted the incidence of disease in the decades ahead. And it even predicted how long they would live. So the people who had the more positive expectations of aging lived for seven and a half years longer than those who had the negative expectations. So it's a massive difference in longevity. And at the time in the paper, the team wrote that,

you know, if we discovered a virus that was reducing people's lifespans by this amount, we would instantly be looking for a cure. But what is it that those expectations do that allow people to live that much longer or that less longer, depending on their expectation? If you're really defeatist about getting older and you assume that you're going to be physically weaker, you're less likely to do exercise, you're less likely to eat a healthy diet. And that in turn is going to then make those predictions come true. It's going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But equally importantly, there's also this physiological mechanism. And that's because if you have this sense that you're more vulnerable, that you're kind of weaker, that your brain's not as sharp as it used to be. That's then going to increase your stress response. And it's going to be a form of chronic stress. And it's not going to be a helpful kind of stress. You're actually all the time just going to feel like you're being physically threatened, that you're facing danger. And then over years, that can do things like increasing inflammation, which can in turn then lead to

bodily wear and tear. Well, clearly, it's really important to understand how our expectations affect our lives in such significant ways. So I appreciate you explaining it so well. Dave Robson has been my guest. He is an award-winning science writer. And the name of his book is The Expectation Effect, How Your Mindset Can Change Your World. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, David. Appreciate you being here. Wonderful. Thanks so much. I enjoyed the conversation. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and

family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, Check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. There aren't too many places in the civilized world where you can go and not get a pizza. Pizza is everywhere. Just about everyone has eaten some. I grew up in the Northeast in Connecticut, and you know, there was a pizza place on every corner. And while we know it's Italian, there's also something very American about pizza,

at least the kind that we eat in America. The story of pizza is a fascinating one, and here to tell it is Mark Masker. He is a food writer and author of the book Totally Pizza, The Wild Story of the World's Most Famous Food. Hi, Mark. Welcome, Mark, welcome. Hi, Mike. I am super happy to be here and actually honored to be doing this. So do we know when the first pizza was, when it was made?

I found research going all the way back to the very first reference to it comes to us in 997 AD when it was referenced in when the word came about. The first modern version of it that we have comes to us in the 1700s. That's when it all sort of came together. The dough, the marinara and the cheese. That's the first part of pizza. As a matter of fact, one of the first pizzerias from that time is still operational in Naples to this day. So pizza is an Italian food.

It started off that way. It certainly didn't stay that way. It was an Italian food. Originally, it migrated over to the United States in the late 1890s because immigrants in Italy were kind of tired of this whole poverty thing, and they wanted to come to the land of opportunity and go from there. Around 1905, you have the first actual licensed pizzeria when Gennaro Lombardi opened it in New York City. He was sort of the pizza guru, pizza Jesus, Jedi master master, whatever you want to name, you want to give to it from that time. A lot of people coming over that would later on open their own pizzerias started working for him. They worked long hours. They learned how to make the stuff and then

saved up enough money to branch out and start their own. And the whole pizza belt in the Northeast sort of grew from that. You mentioned Connecticut. That's where the New Haven White comes from. And Frank Pepe started out. I believe he started out working for Lombardi and moved over there and experimented. And that's where the great experiment for pizzas takes place. Well, and Frank Pepe's pizza is very, very popular back there. Oh, it certainly is. It certainly is. You know, they put white sauce and clams on it, which is unheard of elsewhere. And that's the sort of thinking that leads to things eventually like Hawaiian pizza, which funny enough, I believe was started in Canada. And then, and then it's, as it spreads, it seems that there's, we have different kinds of pizza. We have deep dish and Chicago pizza and, and we have, so,

so how did the, all that evolve? That all really started during, in the years following world war two, you know, there, the Marshall plan comes about the u.s and canada experienced this unprecedented economic growth because they were the only economic powers left that hadn't been directly affected by the war destroying their infrastructure and with all that economic growth comes this need for you know food on the go which is why pizza and burgers and things like that became so popular. In Chicago, what happened was Ike Sewell, who was a salesman, wanted something kind of like a casserole. He was looking for a casserole. He was from Texas, big guy, and he couldn't get what he wanted.

So he talked to a restaurateur who was from Italy. And at first, you know, they were, he wanted Mexican food. I want Mexican food. And they had a, uh, an employee at the restaurant said, I know how to make Mexican food. Well, a few days later, the food poisoning from that experiment went away. And the restaurateur said, you know what? I've got this thing called pizza that may fit the bill. So they started talking about it.

They started working on it. And Ike was like, yeah, but it needs to be more filling. So they eventually came up with an experiment and made the deep dish concept. And it took them, I believe, a year and a half to actually start turning a profit on it. But Ike was a really committed salesman and he made it happen. And so many of the stories about these different types of pizza originate in similar fashion. You know, somebody had an idea to do a different take on it because that's, I think, one of the most beautiful parts about American culture is that you give us something and we'll twist it

and experiment with it and play with it and turn it into something that's almost unrecognizable from, you know, what it once was and evolve it. That's just sort of our thing. Uh, and that's pretty much what happened with every type of pizza since then. One of the things I find interesting about pizza is it's pretty simple, You know, it's flour and yeast and some tomato sauce and cheese. And yet, different pizzas from different places are different. You could put five different pieces of pizza from five different places and they would all taste different in their own way. Pizza's complexity and simpleness are so intertwined, and that's part of the beauty of it, isn't it?

You have bread, meat, or veggies, or both, cheese, some sort of sauce or condiment. That's the simple part. The complexity of it is you can change those things out like a small child playing with Legos and make whatever you want out of it. And it's so universal. Everybody is so familiar with it. It doesn't matter where you go. You can go to India, Africa, China. We know what pizza is. Pizza has been to the International Space Station. What I love about that is it just invites so much culinary experimentation.

But in that experimentation, people develop styles and that's what gives it its recognizability. And it always gives us comfort in that. And all of the pizza for the longest time, it seemed, was just kind of mom and pop places before. Again, similar to hamburgers. It was, you know, the local hamburger joint. And then some big corporations decide that they're going to take this take this national and we get dominoes and pizza hut and all that so how did that start they all pretty they all pretty much started as these mom-and-pop operations that you described i mean the carney brothers started with pizza hut in

kansas tom monahan started his little dominoes thing uh all in the 50s and 60s shaky johnson after world war ii started funny enough he started shakies a few years after disneyland came about and he took some inspiration from that from what disney was doing you know making this a fun place with food. But all of those places started with that mom and a pop dream. Even Red Baron Pizza started with what we now know as bar pizza or tavern pizza and experimenting and playing with it. There was so much demand and all those corporations grew from there. Even the technology for pizza grew like that. Those little magnetic signs that you see on top of delivery cars, or at least used to see for Domino's and Pizza Hut. And even that little three-legged white piece of plastic that goes in the pizza box and the pizza box itself. All of those things came about because what is now a big corporate entity saw a need or a way

to make their pizza stand out from their competition. And it's a pretty amazing success story, I think. Thank God for that little white plastic thing in the middle, because I hate it when the cheese gets stuck to the top of the box. And it always used to happen until somebody stuck one of those little stools in there. I know. It's a genius thing. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. you're the expert, but it seems to me that Domino's at some point really kind of dominated. And I think by their own admission, back in the early days of Domino's domination, their pizza wasn't all that great.

It was fast, but it wasn't people, oh, God, I've got to have Domino's. It was just they could get it to you in 30 minutes or less or it was free. So how did he do that? Tom Onahan's priority was getting it to you on the quick and on the cheap. Papa John's came around and prioritized fresh ingredients and really made it go at making a higher quality chain pizza, if you will. That's when I believe Domino's really had to kind of step it up. But in the beginning, they were just trying to get cheap pizza out on the quick to feed kids. As I recall, in their advertising, they admitted that, that they admitted it wasn't great pizza and that they were upping their game. Yeah. When they started their marketing

campaign to compete, they made the admission and they started to move forward. It's a little bit like what Jack in the Box did in, I believe, the 90s when they went through their sea change and decided, okay, well, we got to come up with a better quality burger during the Burger Wars. If I went to Italy and ordered pizza, having grown up on American pizza, would I notice a difference? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You would certainly notice a difference? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You would certainly notice a difference. Neapolitan pizza is very different, for example, which is considered the birthplace of modern pizza. It tends to be a maximum of around 14 inches in diameter for the crust. The toppings are

very different. Pepperoni, really on traditional old school Neapolitan pizza is not really a thing. You'll find lard, you'll find garlic, toppings like that. If you go to Rome or Sicily, you'll find the rectangular pizzas. They do their crusts differently the tomatoes that they use in in naples are san marzano tomatoes which are grown on the slopes uh of the mountain so the the taste of the sauce is different you'd find that kind of thing also the mozzarella used in Neapolitan pizza comes from water buffalo. It doesn't come from cows traditionally. You talk about the connection between pizza and organized crime. So explain that.

Anytime you have a high cash business, whether it's restaurants, bars, car washes, strip clubs clubs anything like that you sort of invite an element that's going to be looking to launder money or get it get involved that's sort of the main thing that you know it's a good opportunity to launder money at least it was and back in the 80s there was that whole pizza connection trial. It was a big deal. I believe Rudy Giuliani oversaw the trial for the Southern District of New York, where the Sicilian mob and their American connections were smuggling drugs into the US inside bags of pizza ingredients and using pizzerias to distribute as cover fronts to distribute the drugs. I mean, there's so much cash going on, it's very hard to keep track of and very easy to

cook the books. So I think that's where a lot of that relationship comes about. So you had mentioned Papa John's a few minutes ago and he really did kind of change the game, didn't he, for the corporate pizza world? Yes. By doing the fresh ingredients, when he came on the scene, Papa John's really did challenge Pizza Hut and some of the other chains to really sort of up their game. It was similar to and kind of around the same time as what went on with the Burger Wars. There was all this competition going on.

So people started trying new things and it got ugly for a while there between Papa John's and Pizza Hut. There were incidents of one owner's franchise having employees hand out coupons to customers that were receiving pizzas from their competition, that kind of thing. It got pretty ugly, but that's the sort of thing I think that happens when you're forced to kind of change and evolve, which personally, I think it's a good thing. And then there's the gourmet artisan pizzas. When did that start and where?

That started right around 1980 or 82 in California with Alice Waters and Ed Ledoux. Ed was working in a restaurant and the restaurant would let him experiment with pizza and put different things on it. And he was the one who came up with barbecue pizza. And at one point, Wolfgang Puck was one of the victims of one of his experiments, was very impressed by it. And that sort of led to California Pizza Kitchen and that sort of explosion of gourmet pizza on that. And Alice Waters also experimented with much healthier ingredients in that, you know, north of L.A. And really just went to town on it. I believe it's Chez Panisse is where she did that.

And she was putting things like duck on pizza. So she did this whole deal of taking, they both did, of taking the sort of gourmet fine dining thing and bringing it into the world of pizza. One thing that's always surprised me is how no one's ever really mastered frozen pizza. It's just, you can tell a frozen pizza from a mile away. Yeah, and it's not for lack of trying. I mean, going back to when frozen food became a thing, it was, at first it was so bad that it was banned from New York prisons in the late 1890s or early 1900s. I mean, frozen food was really not good until Clarence Birdseye cracked the code for flash freezing. But then with pizza, the issue has always been the crust, right?

Flash freezing the crust, it doesn't rise right. It wasn't until the 1990s when that sort of took its big leap forward, and we got a decent one out of that. When Kraft came out with DiGiorno pizza in 1995, they had figured out a way to make a frozen crust that when you cooked it would rise almost close to properly. Have there been any successful pizza chains that have come and gone? I can't think of any, but there must be some. Godfather's. Yeah, Godfather's.

Godfather's is one of my all-time favorite pieces. I lived on Godfathers in the 80s when I was a kid in Alaska from my teenage years on. And I was so disappointed when it started disappearing and kind of going away. It's really sort of shrunk down. And you can still find it as a matter of fact, on the road between Los Angeles and Vegas, which I know very well off the 15, I believe near Barstow, there's a, a Godfather's express at one of the gas stations. And there is another one out here between Columbus, Ohio and where I live. And the first time that I came out here to meet up with the woman who is now my wife, I introduced her to that Godfather's pizza and it was still good. It was still really high quality. It really sort of kind of fell off the map. I mean,

in the 80s and 90s, it was this big huge thing and it's sort of went away. Another one would be Roundtable. Roundtable has not truly vanished, but they're much harder to find than they used to be. Well, now after talking to you about pizza, I'm hungry for pizza. Probably go get some. Mark Masker has been my guest. He's a food writer, and the name of his book is Totally Pizza, The Wild Story of the World's Most Famous Food, and there is a link to that book in the show notes.

Thank you, Mark. If you were doodling through that last meeting you were at, you probably remember more of it than if you hadn't been doodling. Research found that doodlers have 29% more recall after listening to a fact-filled audio tape than those who just sat and listened. Our minds tend to wander when we're bored, and doodling actually keeps us focused so we can absorb more information. Even when asked to take notes, the group that took notes and doodled remembered more than the group that just took notes.

And that is something you should know. I hope you have enjoyed today's episode of this podcast. And if you did, I hope you'll tell someone else to give a listen and help us grow our audience. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group.

Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot,

and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts.