The Uncertainty Mindset with Author and Professor Vaughn Tan

Welcome to the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast. I'm your host Chris Spear. On the show. I have conversations with culinary entrepreneurs and people in the food and beverage industry who took a different route. Their caterers research chefs, personal chefs cookbook authors, food truckers, farmers, cottage bakers, and all sorts of culinary renegades. I myself fall into the personal chef category as I started my own personal chef business perfect little bites 10 years ago. And while I started working in kitchens in the early 90s, I've literally never worked in a restaurant. This week, I speak with Vaughn tan. He's a strategy consultant professor at University College London and author of the uncertainty mindset innovation insights from the frontiers of food. He specializes in designing organizations that are innovative and adaptable and which thrive in uncertainty. He's spent over a decade working with the food and beverage industry and is on the board of rethink food in New York. We discussed some of the similarities he found while working with these culinary r&d teams. And we reflect a bit on the past year, which has provided quite a bit of uncertainty. We also talked about goal setting, challenging yourself his new project called idk, pizza making and eating meat meat substitutes and vegetables. And thank you to this week's sponsor, olive and basket with more than 30 each oils and vinegars Olive and basket is my go to for specialty food items. They also have seasoning blends sauces, jams, pasta, honeys, mustards, gift baskets, and so much more. A couple of my personal favorites are the Meyer lemon oil and the Greek seasoning vinegar. But I don't think I've ever had anything I didn't like from their shop. Sharon and Cindy do a great job curating a wide selection of items that are loved by both professional chefs and home cooks, located in Frederick, Maryland, their shop is at 5231 buches. town Pike, but you can also order all their products online and have them shipped directly to your house. Go to Olive and basket.com. And the link is in the show notes. And now on with the show. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great week. Hey, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

I'm really glad we could catch up. It's been just about a year now since I saw you in person in Philly.

Absolutely. It's bizarre, right? Because it feels like just yesterday, because a whole year has just disappeared. But yeah, it's been just over a year. I

think you have said that was the last thing I did you know, you know, we're starting to see COVID stuff rolling in. But I don't think many of us were even concerned at that point of going to a convention traveling across the world. Hugging, handshaking, sharing food going out to eat, you know. And it's crazy that literally like less than two weeks after that everything kind of came to a grinding halt. But I you know, I had wanted to catch up with you back then we had started talking, you know, and I said, Let's catch up. Maybe Come on the podcast. And you've seemed to have a lot of things happened between when we met last year. And now and I guess we'll get to that in a little bit. But I wanted to hear a little bit about you know, your backstory, you're not a chef. But you've worked in the food and beverage industry and a lot of different things. So can you talk to me a little bit about what it is you do and how you found yourself in the food and beverage industry?

Absolutely. So I my day job is I'm a strategy professor at University College London. It's gone to School of Management and I teach in it. And I teach strategy for entrepreneurs, right basically strategy and innovation. And the way I got into that was actually through food and beverage So, I've always been really interested in food. I'm Singaporean by birth, I grew up there. And if you know any Singaporeans, you know that they care a lot about food, not necessarily just the fancy stuff, but also food all the way up and down the, in the sense the food chain. And so when I was doing grad school, which was out of business school, and I was very interested in innovation, one of the things that I thought about was, maybe I could go study innovation at restaurants, right, because they do so much of it. And this was back in like the late 2000s, like 2008, nine, I was looking for a project to write my dissertation about. And one day, I happened to go to a lecture that Jose Andres was giving at Harvard, and he had office hours the day after. So I went to office hours, and I just asked him, you know, as a you talk about your innovation team, and you say, you know, he calls it Delta Force. And you say that it's so important to making your business successful and innovative. How about if you let someone come and watch what they do for a few weeks? And I was completely expecting him to say no. But he said, Yes. Why don't you come to breakfast the next day, and we'll talk about it because my two r&d guys are here, like, that's Ben. And I taught. So I did that. He bizarrely said, Yes, come on over. So I came down that month after that, I think, spent a week with them that first time went out with them to Vegas, just before they open three restaurants at the same time in the Cosmopolitan. And then from there, I sort of got to meet other restaurants and chefs, I eventually went to the Fat Duck to modernist cuisine that produces the books, and to another location, which I cannot talk about, but which you all know. And that's sort of my formal kind of connection to, I guess, innovation cooking at a high level, I spent a lot of time in those labs watching what they do.

I can't imagine working, or at least having a behind the scenes glimpse, because those are some of the best places in the world and some of the most innovative, what are some takeaways just from being there? Like, what? Is there a common thread? What were all those places already doing really? Well? you kind of see, because I'm really interested in kind of dissecting like, what makes a kitchen run at a certain level? And what did all those places have in common?

That is an extremely good question. I think this goes to something which I've talked about in the book a lot. But I'll just kind of like extract kind of the top level points, right? I think the most important thing that all of them do is something that maybe is a little bit unexpected, because probably nobody talks about it in quite this way. All of the most successful innovation teams that I've seen, and this is not just in restaurants, but it especially is true in restaurants, the most successful innovation teams all admit to themselves and to other people that they don't know what is going to happen next. Right? So they're not pretending Oh, I know what's going on. I know how to do this innovation thing. I know how to make new stuff. They actually just say to themselves frequently. And they actually also tell other people frequently, that no, we have no idea what's going to happen next. And that's really hard, right? It's hard to admit that you don't know. And it's hard to tell other people that think you should know that you don't know. But that's the that's the secret. That's the uncertainty mindset, if you want to call it that, because the moment you admit that you don't know what's gonna happen next, you instantly become capable of figuring it out. Because you don't have to pretend that you know what's going to happen and how you're going to do it. You can simply say, I don't know, I'm going to ask the right person, I'm going to find the right person to ask, I'm going to try something that might fail. And if it doesn't fail, then I'll build on that. It's like a really powerful thing. And then we can talk about what concrete stuff that they do. But every single one of the good teams that have been to restaurants or not restaurants, absolutely have this mindset. It is the one distinguishing thing that connects all of them.

And then you went on to write a book called The uncertainty mindset. Did you know that you were going to write a book like when did you have the idea to write this book? Why did you want to write this book? And how did it come about? I guess there's a few questions there.

It's a great question, which I can talk about, at length. I think when I first went into these restaurants, I had worked in restaurants, not a lot, but you know, often on the floor, not in the kitchen. And so I knew that restaurants were really interesting, fun places to work in be and obviously if you're a guest, but also that they were really interesting from an organizational perspective, right? Like I I'm a, I teach at a business school, I care about how you organize teams to be good. And so when I went in, I knew that it would be interesting. But when I actually went into these places, which as you point out, like back then this was like 2010 1112. I already knew that they were amazing places the food was, you know, they were already famous back then. But when I went inside, I realized this was like, these were cool stories, too. They were fun stories to watch. Nobody else and nobody else then and to some extent, nobody today knows how it works inside these kinds of teams. And so I think maybe about two or three years after I finished doing the field work, I started thinking, you know, I can write all these papers which were supposed to write, I'm not very good at them. But I want to tell stories, right. So that's where the book came from, it took a really long time to get the book out. And that's part of the uncertainty of all of this stuff that happens.

And then you started the the weekly newsletter, which I thought was amazing, because it was so relevant to the COVID times, you know, it's, it's kind of like, I'm a big fan of Ryan Holiday and the daily stoic and I feel like his book, The Daily stoic is a book that you can read at any time, regardless of what's going on. But then he has his daily newsletter that really, you know, applies to daily life. And I felt like your thing was kind of the same thing, like the book kind of stands up, regardless of when you read it, but then you put out this newsletter that was really hitting on like, I mean, we're in the midst of something that no one in our life has ever really seen. How did you end up doing that? And, like, I don't know, just, you put it together, seemingly, pretty quickly, were you ready to do that?

So I had a thought, I started doing that probably around, like, at the very, very end of 2019. And part of it was because, you know, I, because I'm in like a university teaching, the kind of writing that they kind of, say that we should be doing a lot of is, frankly, it's kind of dry and boring, right? So normal, people don't want to read it. And I don't want to write stuff that normal people don't want to read, it would be fun to write things that are interesting enough or fun enough to read, even if you're not forced to read it, because you're an academic. So that was sort of the initial impulse behind doing that. And I was trying to take the ideas that come out of, for instance, restaurants, that I think are relevant to businesses and to people and write about them in ways that that are understandable and also, but not in a dumbing them down way. And so that kind of took a while, I think I was not expecting the pandemic either. But when the pandemic actually hit, I realized that what I was writing about could be kind of talked about independent of the fact that we're all suddenly in a position of incredible uncertainty. Or I could write about how we're currently in a position of incredible uncertainty and talk about the ideas I was trying to talk about anyway. And then that's what I ended up doing for the rest of that year.

Did you get any feedback that it was almost I don't wanna say, like, too optimistic, but I find there's a couple different camps during the pandemic, like, I personally have had a pretty good year. And, you know, it's hard to say that I don't think people want to hear that. But it's like, you know, I'm healthy. No one in my family was affected by COVID, I had some ups and downs with my business, I pivoted a lot. And I still believe a lot of good things can come out of this. But like, nobody really wants to say that. Nobody wants to hear that, you know, there's a lot of talk about, like toxic positivity. But I do feel that if you are open to observing how things are, where they're going, you can make some really great changes. And I don't know, like, what was your feedback? Did? Was everyone receptive to the things that were coming out in the newsletter? Or did you get any negative pushback or any thoughts on my comments here?

I have lots of thoughts about your comments. So I've actually also had I mean, I don't know if you would say I definitely wouldn't say that I would want what happened in the last year to happen again. Absolutely. At the same time. Yeah, no, absolutely. I don't think anyone would say that. But at the same time, it's also like you said as well not been a totally bad experience, right? Like, it gives you an it forces you not just gives you an opportunity, it gives you an opportunity to try things that you would never have done before if the situation were normal. And not only does it give you the opportunity, it forces you to do it, too. So I am doing all sorts of things that I would never have done. Because before Why would I have done them? And suddenly, now that you're in a pandemic year, you're doing things that would not have made sense before, but you were forced to do them. That's kind of nice. Was there pushback? Actually, it's interesting. I, at this point, I think several 1000 people get the newsletter, whenever I send it out, I haven't sent it out for three months, because I've been buried in a different project. But whenever I sent them out, I actually really got only feedback from people that was positive. It was very strange. I was not expecting it. And I think it's because I was trying very hard to be realistic about what the situation was, rather than being Oh, this is going to end really soon or, or also, trying not to be this is the end of the world. Because there was a time when I think there was really that chance it could it could have been maybe as bad as that. I was just trying to be realistic and and not on realistically optimistic or unrealistically pessimistic. So maybe that's why it was okay. Yeah,

I mean, I think I'm a believer in dealing with the hand you're dealt, right. Like again, I wouldn't want to do this over if you could go back time in time and magically like not have this happen. Obviously, I would want that to happen. But, you know, for me just looking at things like the podcast and where I am with that. It would not be what it is today had I not had to adapt to the situations, you know, I was very comfortable with it being something that I only did in person only did with people in the Washington DC area and had a co host. And now it's like, you know, I don't have a co host. And I kind of like doing it by myself. And now I'm talking to people like you across the world who I don't think I would have pushed myself to figure out how to do a zoom podcast, and I'm very happy with the outcome. I mean, is it worth losing millions of people? So I have a great podcast? Well, obviously not. But you know, again, I'm just trying to cope with things the best way I can. And so I think your your newsletter gave me like some glimpses of hope, and was really interesting, just to kind of put it in perspective. And I think you accomplished your mission of reaching people who weren't academics, because, you know, that would be me, I love to read and dig into things, especially in the nonfiction segment. But I'm not someone who had read like, an academic paper, like I don't go through like professional journals and read them. But I think both your book and your newsletter was very approachable, and would share it with tons of people. I was always sharing it on, you know, my Facebook and my Instagram. So I think you accomplished that there.

Well, thanks for saying that. That's really nice to hear. Frankly, nobody will really admit it. But very, very, very few people will read an academic paper just for fun. I think actually, what you were saying, you know, dealing dealing with the hand that you're dealt with, I think is a really, really good kind of way to talk about. In fact, what a lot of these restaurant teams that I looked at, were so good at doing right? Like they're not pretending that they know more than they actually know. They're not pretending that they have more resources than they actually have. They're simply looking at what they do know, and what they don't know what resources they do have and what they don't have, and figuring things out based on that. And so I completely agree that nobody would wish for millions of people did, and you know, the economic devastation that COVID has wrought is massive. We don't wish for that. But it happened, right? So do you just say, I'm just going to not find ways of changing what I do and who I am so that I can at least adapt? No, absolutely, you shouldn't be saying that you should be trying to figure out how to be a new person in this new world because the world is changing. There's no going back to what happened before. And I think that mindset again, of of simply saying, we don't have to simply assume that we have to always be the same people the same kind of organization. As the situation changes. That's also something which all of these very successful innovation teams were really good at doing. They were not the same from. I mean, even if I went back to them, a few weeks later, things were changing. Like the roles that people play in their teams were changing the way they thought about what good or what innovation was in their restaurants was changing. Some of them completely changed the idea of what cooking is, and what food could be from year to year. Right. And it's that, you know, that there's this idea in a lot of religions actually, of not being bound by attachments that have expired. But there is something very similar to that where a lot of the most successful people who are most creative and adaptable and innovative and all that other stuff. They're also the happiest, because they're not simply clinging on to something which is no longer there. Right. So I mean, I hear everything you're saying I agree with it completely.

Well, what is it about uncertainty? I mean, I guess it's fear, you know, why are so Why are people so resistant to change? I mean, I guess that's the question, Why are people so resistant to change? And what can they do to get over that? Because I think some people were able to adapt quickly, and some people were more digging in and just didn't want to change. And I guess that all leads back to kind of uncertainty and probably tie into fear somewhere.

Yeah. So what what is it about uncertainty that makes it so difficult, I think maybe a good thing to do. Being mindful of time, is, I'll just say what the difference is between what people normally think uncertainty is and what it actually really is, right? So most of the time, when people talk about risk and uncertainty, they usually use the two words more or less interchangeably. But actually, what risk is, is when you know all of the possible things that could happen, you know how likely each one of those things is, you know, how much you want each one of them. And then if you know all those things, you can, of course, decide I'm going to take this action because it's likely to result in this outcome, which I really want. And that's how we normally think about things like cost benefit analyses, right? Whenever you do a business plan, you usually are thinking in this risk mindset. But uncertainty is not like that. Uncertainty is when you don't know what all the outcomes might be. You don't know necessarily all the actions that lead to them. You don't know how likely each one of those actions will be to produce those outcomes. And in many cases, you don't even know how much you want the outcome in that kind of situation. You know, it feels very much like you're adrift right there. You have no anchors, you're not like connected to things like how do you make decisions? I think it's actually when you admit it to yourself for the first time it can be quite terrifying. And I think that's part of the reason why people are so averse to uncertainty. But I think there's two things just to kind of close the thought you mentioned that people are afraid of not knowing. And I think that's 100%. True. There also, and this is not afraid, I think there, this certainly is true for me. And maybe it's true for other people as well. I think we are generally as humans, really happy when things are stable. And we become uncomfortable when things change, right. So when you are looking at an uncertain situation, there's two things One of them is fear of not knowing what to do and how to do it, and whether or not you shouldn't be doing it at all. And the other part is discomfort, which is not about fear, necessarily, it's this comfort with the fact that something which maybe was quite comfortable, is no longer the same thing and no longer comfortable again. So I think there's two parts to the question.

I suppose there are ways you can kind of practice maybe getting used to being uncomfortable. Is that right them? Is that something you can do? And I guess get better at?

I love your leading questions, because you know exactly what it is that I've been working on. I think so yes. So before I show what I've got in my hand, because that's also funny with cards. One thing which, again, I'll go back to examples from all of these very successful restaurant innovation teams, they all practiced being in a situation of not knowing, and being in a situation where things were changing, right, so exactly to what you're saying, it is really hard to be okay with the fear of not knowing, and also be okay with the discomfort of change. But the more you expose yourself to situations where you don't know, and to situations where things change, the more comfortable you are with not knowing and with change. And the other thing about that is, if you expose yourself to situations where you put yourself into uncertainty, or you put yourself into change, and the result is beneficial, it causes you to grow, or you get to something nice, or you know, you just benefit in some way, you start to associate uncertainty and change, not with Oh my God, I don't know what's going to happen, what am I going to do? Or suddenly my comfortable existence is changing, what will I do about that, you suddenly start to associate it with learning, adventure and fun, right, which is actually what we all want. And this is what all those teams did, like, they would always put themselves into situations where they didn't want to do it would be terrifying and stressful for for a while. But if you make it through that, you've got this feeling of like, I did something which before I didn't know how to do at all, there's that learning thing. And you know, if you cook, and if you cook during service, there is a kind of an analogous adrenaline rush, you know, like, it's a really, really, really busy night. Everyone in the kitchen is kind of in the weeds. But things have not seriously spiraled out of control, right, everything is happening. It's like really, really stressful, but you somehow managed to like, make it all the way through. And if you make it all the way through, at the end of service, you've got like an amazing adrenaline rush from having pulled off something that you thought would have just crashed and burned. This is the equivalent for personal growth and learning or team growth and learning. If you keep on putting yourself in situations that create fear for you, or create discomfort for you. But you make it through and you learn, you realize it's actually not that scary. It's not that uncomfortable. And the benefits are actually really quite great. So the thing which you are pointing me to was this thing, which maybe people can't see, they may not be a video, but it's a deck of cards, that's really just a tool for people to put themselves in situations where they don't know. But these situations are gradually designed to increase in the level of discomfort that you expose yourself to. And they're all designed to help you grow as a person. Right. And I think you absolutely can develop the ability to be uncomfortable, not No. developed the ability to change for sure.

So you put together a deck of cards, that what you have people challenges of things to do to get them more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Yeah, for sure. It's a deck of I'm trying to decide how many cards because that's part of the production question that I'm trying to solve at the moment. But it's basically a deck of cards that has a very ambiguous instruction on each one that you can choose to follow or not. So I mean, obviously, this only works if you choose to do it, but none of them are binding. You just do it if you want. And the idea is, each one of these instructions is very, very open ended, but in some ways, quite specific. And it's specific in that it's forcing you to do something which you either don't know, don't currently like or don't know how to do yet. Because when you do it, you might realize that something that you thought you did like you actually do like or something that you thought you didn't know how to do. You now know how to do so they're designed to sort of grab Julie stepped up the game for you. And every time you step up, if you manage to step up, you learn, if you don't manage to step up, you move to the next card and you try something else. So it's kind of like a game that you play by yourself, against yourself for yourself.

I love that I want to try that. And you know, I'm someone who I have always self identified as an introvert. So things like this are really hard for me like this podcast, you know, I'm someone who wanted to just like cook in a kitchen and do my thing. And then as you build and grow your business, getting comfortable with things like, you know, reaching out to a client, or telling someone you can't do something like I don't like to say no, or now with the podcast, reaching out to someone who might be a big name guests, like sending someone a random email, or dm and who you admire and saying, Would you come on my show, like, that's not something I'm still even comfortable with, it's getting better.

You know, it's

like, when I started my business, I joined the Chamber of Commerce. And remember going to that first mixer where there was like, 200 people in the room, and I didn't know a single one of them and you know, needing a drink before I go and start talking to people and giving them my elevator pitch, and then getting better and better. And as I would go every month, I made myself go to everyone, and just start finding new people, because that's not me, I'm the person who always went to the party and stood in the corner and was kind of quiet. So, you know, I've been trying to get better at that. And now people say, I can't believe you're an introvert. Like, you always talk about all these things, you know, and your business and the podcast and having great conversations. But that doesn't come naturally to me Even now, you know, if I want to pitch a publication on, you know, getting a recipe in there, there's that cringe inducing moment of like, should I be emailing this, you know, editor of this magazine? Like, what if they say no, but then remembering like, what if they say no, like, it's not a big deal. It's not like someone cut my finger off. You know, it's just like, it's a no, and getting comfortable with hearing the nose and getting comfortable with the rejections. And I've never had actually any bad rejections or reactions to any of that. But that thing inside you that keeps you from stepping outside your comfort zone

100% agree, I think what you're describing is, you've already been doing these things, right. So what you're describing, if I heard correctly, is, there are things that you now do, which now are, I mean, you still are slightly uncomfortable with them, but you are totally able to do them. And maybe 234 years ago, it would have been something that you required, for instance, alcoholic lubrication in order to be able to do and now you don't need it anymore. And not only that, now you're better at doing it than you were before. It's exactly this idea of you know, you're gradually stepping up your ability to do things. But the kind of the meta ability that's even more important is you're gradually stepping up your ability to do something which makes you uncomfortable, because and this, I think, is a really important thing. It's only when you are doing something which you don't know how to do, that you are actually able to learn and grow. That's definitional. If you already know how to do it, and you're super comfortable with it, you're not learning anything. So if you want to learn as a person, and this applies to all of us, like I mean, I definitely applies to me, like whenever I'm super comfortable, and I know how to do something completely. I can 100% guarantee that I am now just coasting. Right? So, I mean, to your point. I'm also a massive introvert. So doing things like podcasts or like talking about my book, like I hate self promotion. And so it's been kind of an interesting experience to force myself to do these things. And part of that was writing the newsletter, right? The idea that I would ask people sign up for my newsletter, like, listen to what I have to say, that would have been anathema. Three years ago, and it was really, really hard as well.

Yeah, when people unsubscribe from your newsletter, it's still like, Ah, you know, and just getting, you know, comfortable with that. But you know, the digital age has kind of made this both better and worse, you know, like before, if you, you know, wrote a book, and you put it out in the world, like, it would get reviewed by a handful of people. And that's what it was. But now like, we've given everyone a forum, so now the feedback of like, there's 4000 reviews on Amazon, and everyone commenting on your blog post and whatever. And if you're someone who's already not comfortable with criticism and putting stuff out in the world, I think it's even harder now.

Yeah, I think it it is both harder, and also, in a weird, way less hard, right? Because it is harder, because now like you said, You've put something out and then instantly anyone who wants to can just like basically take a look at it and like you know, brick it or whatever. But I think the other thing that kind of is very freeing, which I also discovered through the newsletter is stuff that's boring and bad and crappy that people criticize it vanish. It literally it's like you throw a rock into some water, there is a ripple for a few seconds and then it vanishes. It's like the fact that people criticize people will always criticize, but now it's so transient. You might as well just do it because it's great. It will continue and it will live. If it's bad, people forget about it and like, not even days, like hours, minutes, they'll just go, it'll just be gone. And that's okay.

Do you set goals? And do you have any big goals for this year?

I definitely set goals and I miss most of them.

Yeah. And I was wondering if so if you're someone who believes in uncertainty, like what goal setting looks like, do you keep your goals? flexible, I guess?

Yeah. Another great lead in Chris. So I do believe in goals. And there are some goals that are really, really concrete, right, like so. For instance, if you have to move out of your apartment or house because your lease is up, you got to get a new place to live by some particular date. So there are some kinds of things that I do set goals for, they're super concrete. But then I think that, and this, I think, comes back to the thing that we all care about, which is how do you set goals for things that you don't know about yet? Like, how do you set innovation goals, both if you're in a restaurant, or you're trying to design a new dish, or if you're just a person, and you're trying to design a new life for yourself a new career or a new business model for your business? I think when you have a situation like that, you cannot set these super concrete, very, like granular goals that you know, management gurus usually tell you to do. What you need to do is you need to set what I think of as like an open ended goal where you understand how you know whether or not you've succeeded, because you've thought about that a lot. But you don't say that. In order to be successful, it has to be the following 25 things right. So you need to use an example that maybe is closer to what a cook or chef might experience if they're designing a new dish, because I'm a home cook. So I have ideas in my head about what I want this thing to be, but they don't know how to do yet. And you don't know what it actually will be. But often, when you taste it and you're successful, you know that you nailed it, right? And then it's ready to go. So that's exactly what I'm saying, for open ended goals that are not just about food, it's like, I want to move to another country where the air is cleaner, and real estate is less expensive. Don't say I want to move to I don't know, like rural Sweden, right? Like, leave the goal open so that other things that you don't expect, but actually work can be a success, because then that's where serendipity and innovation really caught like you can be driving around in some part of Southeast Asia and you realize, actually, the air is really clean and real estate is not that expensive. And I quite like it. I would never have thought of living in Southeast Asia because I used to think of living in North America, Europe. But now this actually is something that allows me to achieve my goal, even even though I didn't think that it would have before. And that's powerful, too.

Yeah. And from like a culinary standpoint, I have tons of notebooks. I think it's something lots of chefs do and not just chess, but and it's more of ideas. And yeah, you got your notebooks there. But you know, one of the examples I gave is there was I wanted to make like a bulgur pudding that was like a rice pudding, and I could never get the texture, right. And it was just like all these ideas, and I would do all these tests. And after a couple years, I just tabled it. And it wasn't until Alex Talbott had posted a method on ideas in food where he did like his three minute ricotta where he romanized it by like soaking to pre hydrate and using some baking soda. I was like that's it, right? Like I was like if I soak the bulgur in water for 90 minutes with baking soda, that will tenderize it making me able to cook this super quickly. But it was something that I'd worked on for years, I just couldn't get it because it would always scorch on the bottom. It was just like a big mass and the bulgur would be chewy. And it was just like having the ideas, testing a few things out and then just like tabling it, and then being open to looking around. And when I saw that thing, like I could just put it together and say like, I know this is going to work even without trying. I'm going to make it but this is going to be the key to my success and kind of just being open to those kinds of moments.

Yeah, I, again, I'm nodding really vigorously because that idea of openness only comes when the goal itself is open ended. Right. So if if, for instance, you decided that your goal in making the Bulger pudding was that you are going to do it in a particular way, which is what normally goals say you need to do, then perhaps when you read Alex's post on ideas and food, which is an awesome website, you might not even have thought about the possibility of applying that method to your problem, because you would closed off all of the roads that could have led there successfully, because you decided that the only roads that could leave there were the few of them that you tried and fail. Right. So the open endedness I think is super important. And it's because it precisely gives you the opportunity not only to find a way of defining success that you didn't expect before because you didn't know about it, but it also allows you to find ways of getting to that successful point that you may not have expected and it gives you the ability to see something that might work, and realize that it could work because you're open about all those possibilities.

And sometimes you just miss it, you don't even realize, you know, there's like, you know, like, that was a blog post. And, you know, if you don't read the website for a couple days you miss it. And then it's kind of like one of those missed moments and you don't know if it'll ever happen. So there's some serendipity in there with the timing. Totally. Well, I, I usually ask people, what are some of their favorite culinary resources for you? I mean, it could be culinary. But what are some of your favorite things? You love websites, books? Like what do you continue to go to?

It's a, it's a really good question. Um, what do I continue to go to? So I, I tend not to cook from, or talk about food. I tend not to cook from recipes very much, because I just can't bother to follow a recipe to be honest. But I do, I do go back again and again, to read certain books about food that happened to have recipes inside. So the, the cookbook authors that I like, so I have a I have a big problem with a lot of modern food writing, because I we can talk about that. It's a very hot topic, I think for food writers. But the food writers I like are mostly people who are really old already did. Right. So I love Calvin, trillions, food books, they are sometimes very rarely recipes inside, but they're really, really they happen to be really good writing that is about food rather than food writing. Patients Grey's book, honey from a weed is an amazing book. I mean, there's Oh, you know what, Geoffrey Stein garden is an amazing author as well. super funny. So I go back to those again. And again, I literally will read them for fun because they they're kind of like a way of thinking about what you would want to cook. Instead of here's a recipe for things that you could cook, Richard only, of course, is also really cool.

So how do you how do you develop your recipes or come up with your recipe? So like, I know you're a pizza guy, right? Like, where's your starting point for doing things like pizza, you must have some kind of base recipes that you start with or like how much of that is tinkering for you?

You're right. I really do love pizza. It's become so in lockdown it it was a massive obsession, right? Because it's like, what else do you do? Like let's make some pizza?

Yeah, you started a pizza, Instagram essentially.

Started pizza, Instagram. You know, I? How can you hate pizza? Everybody loves pizza, right? So for years, I've loved pizza, because it's like, how can you hate it? And then over time, I I kind of as I was eating a lot of pizza everywhere, I realized that there were a few pizzas that kind of stood apart. Like I actually really, I mean, the pizza community maybe will like excoriated me for this, but I'm not a huge fan of Neapolitan style pizza. It's a it's kind of, you know, if you eat it within the, I don't know, 90 seconds after it comes out of the oven. And it's perfect. It's delicious. But then you wait a little bit, it becomes soup in the middle. It's like it's it's limp, not a fan. And then I was the first time I had a pizza that just kind of blew my mind. I was in Japan in a seaside town called Kamakura. And it was an Neapolitan style pizza refracted through the Japanese lens of like really doing everything perfectly, and being super refined about how they do things. And it was a Neapolitan style pizza that was incredibly aerated at the rim. Slightly charging to the clinic journey was perfect. But you could let it sit there for like, five minutes, 10 minutes, and it was still crispy, it was still delicious. It was delicious, in a different way. But it was not there was nothing bad about it. And that was the first time I realized you can do something to pizza by being better at cooking it and also being better at developing the dough and all that other stuff. Choosing the flour, all that stuff. To make it something that gets even one level above what what a really good pizza already is because all pizzas at least edible right? And then the next time I had this really bizarre experience was a pizza that blew even that pizza out of the water, which was at UPS in New York. And the first time I had that pizza, it was just like, holy shit. This is incredible. It's It has many qualities of a New York style pizza, because it's very, very thoroughly cooked. But it's aerated. It's light, that the toppings were correct as well in terms of like how much and how heavy they were. And it turns out that they were using a really interesting blend of flowers. Some of it was from upstate New York. And since that time, so I think I had that probably a few years ago, I started getting really interested in wheat and flour, because it turns out that there's lots and lots of different kinds of weeds that you can use. We mostly Think of it as all purpose flour or strong flour. But actually, there are lots of different kinds of flowers if you look hard enough. And if you decide that you want to use these old flowers, which are better for the planet and better for you, you need to change the way you make the dough so that you can produce the pizza that you want. And so that was what I spent a lot of last year doing. And I shared with you I think Chris, the recipe that resulted from it which is actually really quite reliable within a wide range of kinds of flour. And I'm very happy with it. I now use it for a wide range of different kinds of flowers. And I always get to pieces I love. Yeah, I mean,

even when you have bad pizza, bad pizza, still good pizza, right? Yeah,

absolutely. Bad pizza is totally still good.

I've been practicing pizza as well, too. And there's so many. I mean, I guess it's like anything in the food world. There's so many different opinions, like just looking at like, dough recipes, or sauce recipes from really well known people. Like everyone has a pizza cookbook these days. And you look through all of them. And there's no consensus on you know how you should make any of that. And it's just yeah, I feel like you just got to start somewhere and go with it. And yeah, figure out what you like I like I'm a pan pizza guy. Just because I have trouble. Like To be honest, pitching the dough is my challenge. Like I can never get it to slide off. It always looks a hot mess on my baking steal. And I grew up eating like Greek pizza, which is like kind of oily and crispy. I mean, that's all I had growing up in in Massachusetts, like we had a bunch of Greek people in town there was I don't think I had Italian pizza until I was like 21 or something. So I'm a big fan of just getting a nice pan, putting some olive oil in there getting that almost like foccacia. crust. So that's kind of what I've been working on.

Totally. Well, we offline, we should have a little discussion about how to load the pizza onto the steel. I I also learn how to do that through repeated failure. But I have some thoughts about that at the moment. Yeah, I think the biggest thing about kind of developing and I'm definitely not a professional, I'm not a professional cook at all. But developing a recipe. I think a lot of it comes down to exactly as you said, deciding what it is that you want, and be open minded about whether or not what you want will change over time. Right. So before I had this pizza in Kamakura, I was like, Oh, you know, Neapolitan style pizza is great. And then when I had it changes, it rebased lines, my level of quality. And then when I had the up speeds in the baseline, my level quality again, and then of course, you find other pizzas that are at or above that level. So I think of Hail Mary and La as being at the same level as outside, if I'm ever in LA, I will go there. If I'm ever in New York, I go to ops. But once you know what you want, then what you can do is you can start to think, right, because if you don't know what you're trying to get to, in terms of, you know, I want it to be crisp, all these qualities. Once you know what you want, you can start to experiment with flour, you can experiment with hydration, you can experiment with like fermentation, and how you shape and all these other things. And eventually you get to the point where you know what you're doing, because what you're doing gets you to the zone that you know that you like, and that zone is still very open ended. Like sometimes you can run into a pizza that is surprisingly good in the sense that it's good in ways that surprise you. And that's actually what we all want when we're eating out right like we want. Sometimes we want comfort. But what we really want is we want something that gives us a new definition of delicious that changes what we think delicious is. And it's super rare to get that even at a really fancy restaurant.

I mean, so often we're using something as a reference point. And I think that can be both a good thing and a bad thing. Like when you're describing what you've made, you're going to say, well, it's a pizza. And if people have a preconceived idea of what a pizza is, then if it's not quite like that they might be disappointed. I do the same with my food is I create totally new dishes, but I feel like I have to say it's like a pimento cheese or it's like a meatloaf. You know, I think that's the that's the challenge with like the whole vegetable burger thing. Like there's some amazing non meat burgers that are not like beef, like I if you've ever had superiority burger in New York, like it's one of the best things ever. It's not like a beef burger. It might be better than a beef burger. And I think all these people who are trying to make like the beyond burgers and the impossible burgers are trying to make it like meat. But you can have this amazing thing. And it's and it all goes back to like a reference point of like what a burger is, I think.

Yeah, I so I totally agree. I actually, you know, call me a Luddite. But I would much rather eat vegetables. If I wasn't eating meat, then eat a meat substitute. And I agree also about superiority burger, because I think it's awesome. And in fact, the gelato like Brooks, amazing pastry chef, right, the gelato is also really, really good as if you're already. Yeah, that what you said about the reference point, I think makes a lot of sense. What I would love is for is for people to come up with an idea of what they want, rather than trying to figure out what they want based on what other people say is worth wanting. And I think the kind of, you know, the VAT meat or meat substitute trend is is borne out of people believing that meat inherently is good and delicious, when in fact, it's not true, right? Most meat is actually not that good. And also not that good for you. And also not that good for the planet. Why not just eat a lot less meat, but only the really good stuff. It'll still end up being cheaper and then eat Vegetables along the way.

Yeah, I mean, um, so my wife and I were vegetarians for about five years, we're not anymore. But when we eased back into eating meat, it was like that conversation of like, when we buy meat, let's buy it from, you know, local farms, let's get the best, you know, product available. But like Tonight, we're having red lentil and carrot soup at home and it's completely vegan. Like, we don't need meat tonight for dinner. And tomorrow, if we have meat, it'll be a better quality. You know, I've got some great pork chops from a local farm that's raising heritage breed Berkshire pigs. And you know, I'd rather spend 999 a pound on pork chops tomorrow night and eat a vegetarian soup tonight instead of just like $3 commodity meat every day. But yeah, you know, I think people are on either sides, like, at this point is like you either understand that or you don't and I don't know that you can convince people either way?

Well, I, I hope that we can, because otherwise, you'll have either people just eating a lot of really crappy, inexpensive meat, that's bad for them. And for the planet, it doesn't taste very good. Or, alternatively, you've got like meat substitute. That's actually not very good for the environment, either. And will end up being very expensive and will not taste in my opinion. Very good. Yeah, I think maybe the way to get to the point where people realize that it's better to have, I guess, balance in how they think about, especially things like meat substitutes, or, or food in general is, it makes a lot of sense to just eat less of something so that you can eat only the best of it, than to try and eat a lot of something that you can afford by eating the worst, cheapest version of it. Right. So I think the reason why for you, you feel like it's okay to spend 999 a pound for pork chops maybe once every few days or once a week or once every two weeks, is because the other food that you're eating along the way is not like privation so that you can afford the pork chops. It's like your carrot lentil soup will probably be pretty delicious, right? It's not like, because there's no meat in it, this food is shit. It's that there is no meat in it. And this food is great. And what that also happens to me is when I do have meat, I can have the really good stuff. And that's okay. And that's probably the way that's the healthy way of thinking about food. I think in general. Yeah,

I yeah. I mean, I am optimistic now that we shouldn't be continuing to try and put that out in the world for people. But I do feel like I mean, we've been talking about this, maybe it's just because I'm in the food world for like, a couple decades now. And there's still, you know, we're moving some people a little bit, but I don't think as much as maybe we could and I don't know what if there's an easy answer, I don't think there is there's never an easy answer.

No, that there definitely is an easy answer. And I think it's made harder by the fact that all the cheap crappy stuff, and it doesn't matter whether it's meat, or it's not meat. It's all backed by significant economic interests that want people to buy more of that stuff, right? So, you know, if you're, if you're an amazing chef that cooks like a vegetable centric menu, you're doing your best to show that more vegetables is not worse taste, and is better for you. But can we fight against literally billions of dollars of marketing for people to buy more? I don't know, cheap meat, basically, or billions of dollars, billions of dollars of farm subsidies so that cheap meat and cheap dairy and cheap wheat can be produced, like this much economic incentive for the bad stuff to be promoted? which is which is challenging?

Are you working on any new projects? Or do you have enough on your plate right now? Anything big coming up?

So I've been trying to get this off the off the ground for like, actually, over a month and a half because the production issues are. I mean, I used to be I used to be a printer. So I'm surprised by how I'm unable to solve this problem. But this is an interesting one. I actually am, I've been thinking about trying to produce two new books, or three of them. One of them will be a very small self published one about how to make better pizza at home using only the tools that you have if you are at home. But the other two actually deal with things that we've just been talking about. I've been interested in natural wine and wheat for a really long time. And I think I've been thinking about trying to write a book about the relationship between how we think about eating, the way we produce things like wine and flour and other stuff. And the kind of the cultural context of eating right, because exactly like what we've just been talking about. The reason why we eat the things that we eat is not only because this is how they get produced, it's that the way they get produced and why we choose to eat them are all part of one sort of Nexus. So we can't talk about why we eat the things that we eat without talking about the economics we can talk about the culture and the sociology of it and I kind of want to Do that. But in a way that's not academic, right? I want to tell some stories of interesting people who are growing really cool stuff, and use that to explain why that stuff should be grown and why you should be eating it.

So continuing writing, I don't even I can't imagine writing a book, like I have written like blog posts and stuff. But just the process of writing a book seems so overwhelming to me. I guess you just have to break it off one piece at a time.

Yeah. And actually, the what I'm thinking about doing is writing it initially as a serial thing. So I would do the work ongoing, and then produce it, I can newsletter. And then at the end of it, it kind of sticks together, I'll find a way to stick it together into a book. But if not, then I've just got an old 40 or 50 issues that each one of them profile some person and maybe it's fun to read. It's not too long. I'm not sure yet. This is what I've been thinking about. Because, you know, one of the things about the last year is books take a really long time. It's like, life may be too short to write books in that way, but they may be more fun and easier to read and maybe profitable if you write it in a different way. So yeah, for sure.

My favorite my favorite book, this last year was the almanac of navall raava. Khan, do you know of navall? And have you heard of that book?

I have heard of the book. I do not know how he can't because he's very famous. I haven't read it yet. But I it is on my there's a list on that whiteboard over there. And it's on. It's on that list. Unfortunately, not very close to the top, but I'll get there eventually. What What did you like about it? Well,

I mean, the interesting thing is, it's literally a guy who compiled like his work, like navall didn't write it. It was basically someone took all of his tweets, transcribed, like all these podcasts he'd been on and just put together like a book of wisdom that was already out in the world. That's no new content. It was just this guy who worked and said, I'm going to go and I'm going to compile all of his tweets, like his tweet storm on financial on wealth building, and all of his tweets on happiness. And then he's going to transcribe this podcast that he was on. And you know, Nevada proved that I think he wrote the intro to it. It's 100%. Free. So if you go on, I think his name's Eric Jorgensen on his website, you can download an E pub or PDF for free. You can read it in your web browser, if you want to purchase it. I think it's like $15, maybe, and you can purchase it. But if you want it completely for free, so I'm always telling people, it's it's great. But the idea that it wasn't a new content, someone just compiled all this wisdom that was already out in the world. So yeah, go to if you Google it, it might be the almanac of navall. I don't remember.

I think that's what it is. I'll definitely look it up. I didn't realize it. What's that? Actually, yeah.

And I it was really interesting that he you know, that's a new way of doing a book as just like compiling the stuff that was already out there, into a handy reference guide broken down into topics and subtopics. So new models of putting books out, I thought about, like, at some point, transcribing these podcast interviews and putting together like my own, you know, compendium of wisdom from people in the food world.

Like Tim Ferriss. Yeah, that's what that book was.

I mean, I love it. I love his books. And the idea that, you know, although he said a lot of it was the outtakes. Like, I think the stuff in his books were things that came out of his notebooks that actually didn't even make it to the shows. But really, Oh, yeah, yeah, that he had kept all these notebooks on all these people. But the idea that, you know, you can easily transcribe our conversations. And again, another big task that's like, not on the anywhere near to do list. But in my old age, when I want to put this stuff out, do you have anything you want to go over? Before we get out of here today? What What didn't we go into? I'm sure there's a million things, but anything you really want to leave us with?

Yeah, I think if I had to leave all of the listeners with one thing, it would just be that the most important part of being innovative, creative or adaptable, is admitting first to yourself, and then to other people that you don't know, the simply being able to say that to yourself first, and then to others will instantly change. Basically everything that you do to do the things that you do. So the moment you can admit that publicly, which happens only after you can admit it to yourself, like things will suddenly change. It sounds so weird and very self helpy. But it genuinely is true. Like the moment you say, I don't know, and you are willing to admit it, suddenly you will do things differently. And you will find that you're learning more stuff just accidentally. And that's the that's the main takeaway. That's the uncertainty mindset.

I love that. That's a great tie in with your book. Yeah. So again, you know, I recommend everyone who's listening, check out the book, check out his newsletter. Are you going to keep up the newsletters indefinitely? Is that something people can continue to go back to on your website?

Yeah, the news that has been down for three months because I've been rethinking what it will be. I'm going to start doing different format. I think I'm going to have I've had actually I've been sitting on audio that I've recorded with some interesting People, including some chefs that people will know that I want to have a more conversational, looser format. Some weeks it'll be audio, some weeks will be a bunch of photographs, some weeks, it'll be an article. And it'll be less frequent. But it's coming back, I just don't quite know when it's going to come back yet. Because I've got some stuff I need to get out before,

but are the old issues still up there like the old, like, old weekly, so anyone can go through all the back stuff, if they haven't caught up yet, still Sure. available.

And in fact, it's going to stay up for I mean, as long as substack wants to keep it up, it'll be up there. And then there's also the index website that I made for it so that you can navigate all the topics, it was kind of like a weird over the holidays project that took way more time than I thought it would. But it's, uh, it was kind of a way to, you know, it's actually maybe not quite like the almanac of well, but it was a way for me to think about all the themes that were going on inside and then try and pull them out so that you can navigate by theme, instead of simply going issue by issue on the newsletter. So I can send you the link to that as well. And then, yeah, I've

seen that I thought that was really helpful you have in the sub topics. And it actually does remind me of that book, where it's kind of like, if you want to talk about this, you know, go to this issue, this issue this issue. I think that's fantastic. So I'm gonna leave it up. It was great talking to you. So thanks so much for coming on the show. I'm glad we could catch up. And hopefully we can maybe catch up in person at some point.

Yeah, it was, this was a lot of fun as both Thanks for having me. And I also mean, one of the things that is really interesting about the last year is we just haven't seen a lot of people in person. But maybe for you like it was for me, we've expanded our networks, bizarrely, to people way far away, right, that we would never have done before. Which only makes me want to actually meet those people in person even more. So I hope. I don't know. Maybe by 2022. Yeah, it'll be possible.

Sounds good? Well, the first place on our travel list is the UK. So my wife and I've been talking about that my wife used to cook in Wales actually once upon a time and she some manner the name escapes, and it's like this really fancy ritzy. Cool, yeah, place and she did her culinary internship there a while ago, and we're just checking it out online. But it's I don't know if it's like a Golf Resort or something. Celtic Manor, it's called.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's in Wales.

It's called the it's called the Celtic Manor. And she did her culinary internship there and she loved it. And she's like, you know, we go gotta go to Cardiff and all these places, and our kids are going to be nine this summer. So they're, you know, we're more comfortable traveling with them a little bit. So yeah, that's one of the places we want to go and kind of spend an extended period of time out that way. Awesome.

Well, if you're ever in Europe, you know, we should at least get a drink. But probably go eat something right. That'd be fun.

Most definitely. Yeah. Well, thanks again for coming on the show. And to all of our listeners. This has been Chris with the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast. As always, you can find us at Chefs Without restaurants.com.org and on all social media platforms. Thanks so much, and have a great day. Thanks for listening to the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast. And if you're interested in being a guest on the show, or sponsoring the show, please let us know. We can be reached at Chefs Without restaurants@gmail.com. Thanks so much.