Something You Should Know - How Expectations Steer Your Life & The History of the World’s Most Favorite Food - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: April 6, 2024

Well, this sucks… it turns out that nice people make less money than mean people. That hardly seems fair. This episode begins with an explanation of why this happens and how much more mean people make. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904823804576502763895892974 How you expect your life to go is a very powerful indicator of how it actually will go. Whether it is your health, happiness, how much you weigh or even how long you think you will live, your expectations have a lot to do with the final result. This is according to David Robson, an award-winning science writer who has researched the science of expectations. He is author of the book The Expectation Effect (https://amzn.to/3KfXZKR) and he joins me to reveal how having positive expectations can make your life a lot better. Do you know when and where was the first pizza made? Why couldn’t anyone make a decent frozen pizza until 1995? And what ever happened to Round Table Pizza or Godfather’s Pizza? I explore these any many questions about pizza 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). There is an assumption that if you are doodling, you are not paying attention. Many students have been reprimanded by teachers for that exact reason. Well, that is just plain nonsense. Listen as I explain the truth about doodling and why you should do it. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090226210039.htm# PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Indeed is offering SYSK listeners a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING NerdWallet lets you compare top travel credit cards side-by-side to maximize your spending! Compare & find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, & more https://NerdWallet.com TurboTax Experts make all your moves count — filing with 100% accuracy and getting your max refund, guaranteed! See guarantee details at https://TurboTax.com/Guarantees Dell Technologies and Intel are pushing what technology can do, so great ideas can happen! Find out how to bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com/WelcomeToNow You can get a ticket for texting while driving. Put the phone away or pay! Paid for by NHTSA Listen to TED Talks Daily https://www.ted.com/about/programs-initiatives/ted-talks/ted-talks-daily Wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, how being nice can cost you a lot of money. Then how changing your expectations can change your life. From your health, your happiness, even how you age. 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, Also, why doodling when other people are talking is a good thing. And everything you've wanted to know about pizza, including why frozen pizza has been such a disappointment. The issue has always been the crust, right? Flash freezing the crust, it doesn't rise right.

It wasn't until the 1990s when Kraft came out with DiGiorno pizza in 1995. All this today on Something You Should Know. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.

And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, and welcome to Something You Should Know. This is one of our choice episodes that we release every Saturday. And we start today with a question. Are you a nice person? Well, the bad news is, if you are a nice person, there's a good chance that your mean co-worker makes more money. According to an article

in the Wall Street Journal, the more agreeable we are, the less we earn. Nice guys take a bigger hit than nice women. Men who scored high on the rudeness scale were likely to I'm not sure what you should do with this information. I guess you could become a real jerk and make more money. But don't do that. 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 in 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 behaviour, 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 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. And 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 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 and but I never did so was I doing something wrong or and or not everybody achieves their goals even with a positive mindset so how 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. 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, 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 maybe it feels pretty good. But 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, like I do enjoy the discomfort to a certain extent. So I do think the mindset can actually have kind of these benefits while you're doing the exercise, as unbelievable as that could seem.

But I would say that for me, and 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 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. They have a higher body temperature as 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. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat.

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and actually enjoy economy. 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, it 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, 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 so common. It's an epidemic in Western countries that people are overweight. They try to lose weight. Come New Year's Eve, they set their resolution. And a few months later, they say, I can't do this. I'm not made for this. I'm just going to be fat. a lot of us just, even if we go on diets, a bit like with 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 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 predisp 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 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 used this data, and it had really tracked people's health across their lives. And in the kind of at midlife, or just before, it had asked people, what do you expect from 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 ageing 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, you know, 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. I appreciate you being here. Wonderful. Thanks so much. I enjoyed the conversation. 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. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for.

Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, 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

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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. Hey, 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 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 wasn't 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, whatever 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 we have, so how did all that evolve? that all really started during in in the years following world war ii 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 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, it's funny, he wanted something like a kind of like a casserole. He was looking for a casserole. He's 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 an employee at the restaurant said, I know how to make Mexican food. Well, a few days later, uh, the food poisoning from that experiment went away and the restaurateur said, you know what, let's, 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 came up with, 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. 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 of all that, that's just sort of our thing. 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 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 recogniz was, you know, the local hamburger joint. And then some big corporations decide that they're going to, you know, take this national and we get Domino's 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 shakey's a few years after disneyland came about and he took some inspiration from that, from what Disney was doing, 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. They just, there was so much demand and they all, 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, you know, 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. So it seems to me, I mean, I'm no expert, you're the expert, I know. It's a genius thing. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So it seems to me, I mean, I'm no expert, 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 got to have Domino's and some of the other chains to really start upping their game was when Papa John's came around and prioritized fresh ingredients and really made a 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. 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 Naples are San Marzano tomatoes, which are grown on the slopes of the mountain. So 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, anything like that, you sort of invite an element that's going to be looking to launder money or get involved.

That's sort of the main thing. It's a good opportunity to launder money, or 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, 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. 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 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. 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. 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. and gone i can't think of any but there must be some godfathers yeah godfathers godfathers 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 it's 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 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's just it really sort of kind of fell off the map. I mean, in the eighties and nineties, 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 a 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's 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's 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

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