#397 Jiro Ono: Simplicity Is The Ultimate Advantage

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/5ed7a0515b7680c8

This will be one of the most incredible stories you will ever hear for his entire seventy five year career.
Giro was solely focused on serving his customer.
And making the very best product for them.
Jiro invented new ways to make sushi that no one else was able to create.
was absolutely obsessed with crafting a high quality product.
And ran tens of thousands of experiments throughout his entire life.
Every single experiment.
was aimed at making a better product.
for his customer.
Giro's relentless dedication to proving his craft.
And his products.
Reminds me of my friend Karim, who's the co founder and CTO of Ramp.
Kareem is one of the greatest technical minds working in finance. I spent a lot of time talking to Kareem in every single conversation.
centers around his obsession with crafting.
A high quality product.
and using the latest technology to constantly create better experiences for his customers.
Karim and Giro both believe
That nothing is ever good enough.
And can always be improved.
Karim is running one of the most talented technical teams in finance
And they use rapid, relentless iteration to make their product better every day.
Just like Jiro.
So far this year?
Ramp has shipped over three hundred new features. Ramp is completely committed.
to using AI to make a better experience for their customers.
And to automate as much of your business's finances
as possible. In fact, Karim just wrote this.
AI is all I think about these days. It is our duty to be first movers and push limits.
So we can make the greatest possible product experience.
for our customers.
That sounds a lot like the approach used by a lot of the great founders that you and I study on this podcast. They use a combination of craftsmanship.
And rapid iteration to invent new products for their customers.
Many of the fastest
growing and most innovative companies in the world.
Are running their business on ramp.
Make sure you go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money. Let AI chase your receipts and close your books.
So you can use your time and energy building great things for your customers. Cause at the end of the day
That is what this is all about.
Building a product or service that makes someone else's life
Better.
That is what I'm trying to do.
That is what Giro dedicated his entire life to doing, and that is what Ramp has done.
Get started today by going to ramp.com. Another way to better serve your customers is by keeping their data secure and proving you're doing so by using Vanta. Vanta's value prop is very clear.
Vanta helps your company prove you're secure so more customers will use your product or service. Many companies will not sign contracts.
Unless you're certified and this is causing you to lose out on sales. That is why the average Vanta customer.
reports a five hundred and twenty six percent return on investment.
After becoming a vanta customer.
Automate compliance, security, and trust with Vanta. You can think of Vanta like an intelligent security assistant.
That helps your company pass audits.
without tons of manual work. So not only do you make more money with Vanta
But you also save more time with Vanta. Manual compliance is slow and painful.
Doing everything by hand takes months.
The best companies absolutely will not tolerate that. They will not tolerate
Wasting valuable company time.
Doing something with labor.
When technology can automate it. That is a very old and powerful idea that goes all the way back to Andrew Carnegie.
And you and I see it over and over and over again in these biographies.
Vanta will help you win trust, close deals, and stay secure.
Faster and with less
effort. Go to vanta.com to learn more.
And if you want to get set up right away.
Email me.
David at Founders Podcast dot com, put Vanta in the subject link.
And I will introduce you personally.
One of my favorite documentaries that I've watched over and over again.
is this documentary called Jiro Dreams of Sushi. It is about
The greatest sushi chef of all time. His name is Jiro Ono.
At the time that the documentary was created, he's eighty five.
Years old.
What I did for this episode is I actually transcribed
The entire documentary.
And then I went through that document just like I go through
Every single book that you and I talk about together.
So I wanna start with the very beginning.
Of the documentary.
You see Giro.
He's talking directly to the camera.
And he tells us exactly why the documentary is named Giro Dreams of Sushi.
He says I would see ideas in dreams.
My mind was bursting with ideas.
I would wake up in the middle of the night.
In dreams I would have visions of sushi.
The very next thing he says is advice to other people, but it's really the advice that he lived his life.
Buy he had the same job.
at the time the documentary was made, for seventy five years.
Once you decide on your occupation.
You must immerse yourself in your work.
You have to fall in love with your work.
Never complain about your job.
You must dedicate your life.
to mastering your skill.
That is the secret of success.
And is the key

Honorably.
So right at the very beginning, they described Jiro as a shokenin. So a shokenan is a Japanese word roughly translates to an artisan or craftsman.
If somebody's referred to as a shokenin, that means that's that's somebody that has mastered a craft.
They tend to have a lot of similar traits regardless of what that craft happens to be.
Dedication to excellence in one's craft.
We'll be present every single shocking in.
You'll have a sense of moral duty to do the job perfectly.
На часто приде, бо то серв соціально.
They have lifelong discipline.
To continuous improvement this idea of Kaisan.
Or Kaizen.
That pops up in a lot of these biographies that you and I discussed together.
And they have a almost spiritual respect.
For tradition.
and the process
of the craft itself.
Now in the documentary, they introduce you to all these other people around Jiro. Some of them are his apprentices.
His two sons.
Every single one of its vendors.
the writers and the food critics and what they all have in common with Juro.
is they do things for an excessively long time and they've done it
In a volume and a quantity more than anybody else. So the very first food writer or food critic that we're introduced to
Says, listen, I went to every single sushi restaurant in Tokyo.
Nobody has eaten more sushi than me.
Out of the hundreds of restaurants that I ate at
Jiro.
Was by far the best. So I have a funny story. I went to Japan for the first time.
Uh last year.
I have never had sushi in my entire life, even though I've watched this documentary probably ten times.
A friend of mine got us a reservation at Jiro, which is almost impossible to do. So the very first time I ever had sushi in my life.
Was at Giro.
It was incredible. So I left that meal. I was like, I cannot believe I I wasn't eating sushi for.
I love sushi now.
Wrong. No. No.
The next day we went to another spot.
Not remotely the same experience.
And sin, every single time I've tried to eat sushi, I really didn't like it that much.
Where I think Jero's excellence.
Had completely ruined it for me.
And something that stands out in the documentary. Again, what I'm trying to do is like I'm not really trying to talk about sushi or sushi chef.
I'm interested in these ideas. Like you can extract turn everything into an extraction. Take the ideas out of
His approach to his craft and think about how can we use them for ours?
What one of my favorite quotes about James Layson, who's obviously a big hero of mine, I won't stop talking about him. I've done you know four or five episodes on him. I do a new episode every hundred, uh hundred episodes.
He has this idea that difference for the sake of it that you must insist on differentiation.
And so this food critic
Ізкрывінь ж хаунжу.
The fact that the greatest sushi chef that has ever lived is in this tiny tense restaurant.
Next to the subway station.
And the entire meal is gonna be over in fifteen or twenty minutes. So he says
It's comfortable for people who like to have sushi served at a fast pace.
But for people who want to drink and eat slowly while chatting, it will not be a comfortable
eating experience. Again, difference for the sake of it.
All of the sushi is simple. It is completely minimal.
Мастер шеф.
From all around the world.
come to eat at Juros and say how can something so simple have so much depth and flavor?
If you were to sum up Giro Sushi in a nutshell.
It says ultimate simplicity leads to purity. One of my favorite quotes.
That I keep on my phone and I look at all the time.
It says a novice is easily spotted because they do too much.
Too many ingredients, too many movements, too much explanation.
A master uses the fewest resources required to fulfill their intention.
That could have been written about Jiro.
Back to the way that Jero designed his business. Reservations are mandatory. Price is around four hundred dollars per person. So the time the documentary came out, it was thirty thousand yen.
I think now the minimum price is sixty thousand yen.
And so that conversion is today is about four hundred dollars per person.
They only serve sushi, no appetizers, nothing.
But
Sushi.
The counter only fits ten people total.
The meal lasts about fifteen to twenty minutes.
So it's roughly you're spending about twenty five dollars per minute. In that sense, it's one of the most expensive restaurants on a per minute basis in the world.
And yet the people who eat there are convinced it's worth the price.
And so a large part of the documentary is the actual process, like what how
is this tiny little ten seat restaurant, this three star Michelin restaurant.
In a Tokyo subway.
Why do people come from all over the world to eat here? And so they talk about it's like listen, the techniques that we use they're not a big secret.
It's a just about making an effort and repeating the same thing every day, which again is what Shokanen do.
So Gerald repeats the same routine every day.
He even gets on the train from the same position.
He dislikes holidays.
He thinks holidays are too long. He wants to get back to work.
His routine.
This idea of doing the same thing every day.
It's really the spirit of the Shokanet.
He says it's unthinkable for normal people.
And so one of the main ideas that's implied throughout the entire documentary, they just said, Listen, the techniques we're using, it's no big secret. You can see what we're doing.
It's just about making an effort and doing so for seven and a half
Decades.
So you will see them.
Run.
Countless tastings and experiments every day in the documentary.
And they've been doing in Jura's case, he's been doing that for over seven decades. So he's learning new things every single day and just iterating day after day after day.
with making his product better. That's ex the the one of the main points of the documentary. And he says
If it doesn't taste good, you can't serve it.
It has to be better than last time.
That's why I'm always tasting the food.
Before serving it.
Jiro's not just the chef, he's the first customer.
And then you he's gonna have another trait.
Where you see over and over again with a lot of history screened entrepreneurs.
The inner monologue, they are unbelievably self critical. Nothing is ever good enough. Since I've seen many chefs who are self critical.
But I've never seen a chef who is so hard on himself.
He sets the standard for self discipline and when we go into his childhood
and the just atrocious way he grew up. This will make perfect sense to you and why he f he realized that just having a skill that no one could take away from you is a way for him not to star. It's a way for him not to sleep on the street. It makes perfect sense when you learn about childhood.
I've seen many chefs who are self critical, but I've never seen a chef who's so hard on himself. He sets the standard for self discipline.
He's always looking ahead.
He's never satisfied with his work.
He's always trying to find ways to make the sushi.
Better.
Even now.
That's all he thinks about.
All day.
Every day he is obsessed.
He is focused. He's eighty five years old. Again, I've already said this a few times. He's eighty five years old.
At the time this documentary comes out.
But if you go back to what he says.
Really hard himself.
S very disciplined.
Always looking ahead, never satisfied with his work.
Look at the the the biographies and autobiographies you and I have been discussing over the past few weeks.
If you look at the Ferrari, Michael Ferrero, the Michelin brothers.
Leonardo De Vecchio.
Every single one of'em was like this. They didn't sleep on winds, they didn't rest on laurels, they're never satisfied, they're constant. They worked on what they
In many cases, I think the average length of their career and running their business was somewhere anywhere from forty five years to seventy years. And it didn't matter if they're making tires.
Chocolate.
Eye glasses.
Ferraris they were always looking ahead. They were never satisfied with their work.
Just like Giro at eighty five years old, even now.
That's what he thinks about all day, every day. I just want to make
Sushi.
Better. He's dreaming about it.
One of my favorite quotes in the entire documentary.
Is that uh he says when he makes like really good sushi, he just feels victorious. He's like hyped up. I absolutely love it.
The food critic is like, Hey, you know, I analyze a lot of great chefs all over the world.
They tend to have these a these five attributes.
Giro has them all as well.
uh they have a lot of commonalities in the way they approach their work. Number one
They take their work very seriously and constantly perform on the highest level.
Second
They
Аспирту импровдер скилл.
Three.
They're obsessed with cleanliness. This is again, this is something that popped up in the Dovecchio episode.
The Ferrero episode. Remember?
Michael Ferrero built a forty billion dollars, probably worth way more than that now.
Forty billion dollar private company.
And the guy would take his helicopter and he'd land at all the other factories making his chocolates.
And he'd take out a glove and he'd run his finger over the machines.
This is very fascinating to me.
I you just see this.
Obsession with cleanliness over and over again. Third is cleanliness. If the restaurant doesn't feel clean, the food isn't going to taste good. I read a bunch of other profiles.
on Jiro and I found something that's very fascinating. Says his restaurant remained immaculately clean.
Leading another food critic to s to say that Jiro's establishment might be the cleanest restaurant in the world.
From the gleaming knife blades to the polished countertops, everything at Giro reflected its owners' belief.
That excellence was a habit.
Practiced every day with no shortcuts.
The fourth attribute is impatience. They are better there's a great line. They are better leaders than collaborators.
They're stubborn and they insist on having it their way.
And finally number five.
A great chef is passionate.
Giro has all of these attributes. He's a perfectionist.
And Giro was like this decades before he became famous. He doesn't start his restaurant.
I think he wins.
It's the Michelin star.
In when he's like eighty two.
So they actually interview this guy who apprenticed
for Jiro up until Jiro was sixty. So he says when I apprenticed for him, he wasn't famous yet, but he always worked incredibly hard.
He would not take a day off.
The only time he would not be at the restaurant was when there was an emergency, like a funeral.
I would not say he is a centric, he just works relentlessly every day.
That's how Shokanen are.
The way of the shoken is to repeat the same thing every day.
They just want to work.
They are not trying to be special, but that's
This is the beauty of this.
The fact that if you just love the activity for the sake of itself
If you work on it every day, if you do it for a long time, you become special.
Nobody becomes great at something you do part time or temporary.
They do it decade after decade after decade.
Another great line that came to my mind when I got to the section.
It's one of my favorite things Walt Disney ever said. He says if we lose the details, we lose
Everything Jiro says to us it is essential to check every detail. I guess the way I think about Jiro.
Is
He limited
The the number of details to perfect and then he made every detail perfect.
So he says it's essential to check every detail. What the staff might not notice.
I know this because I've been doing it for so long.
I give them detailed instructions on what to do.
There's this great
Uh profile.
on Bernard Alno, the founder of LVMH.
In that profile, his kids so Jiro's two sons work with him.
Bernard Arnaud's kids work with him.
One of his sons says something that's very fascinating. It's exactly what Giro just said. He's like, Well
I notice a bunch of details. They might not notice it. The reason I notice this is because I've been doing it for so long. Let me read.
What Bernard's son said.
Talking about his father. He made a bunch of comments that were very
Very detail oriented.
Things that you wouldn't typically notice.
But once you've seen tens of thousands of stores over the years.
It's what comes to your mind immediately.
There's another great line in that Arnold profile says Arnold spots any incongruities.
That might disrupt the aura of opulence.
That he has carefully constructed.
You could say that line.
with Walt Disney and Walt Disney's
Construction of Disneyland.
There's ideas in that book where he's walking on Main Street.
There's something that's fifty feet in the air and he sees something's off with it.
He spotted any incongruity that might disrupt the aura of opulence that he has carefully constructed.
Same thing with Giro and his ten seat restaurant.
Something that's repeated over and over again. I've already brought it up several times to you.
Giro is constantly
Tasting his own food.
Are you constantly using your own product? It's like a very basic, simple idea that almost no one does.
This is another great example.
It's one of my favorite ideas. It it jumped out the very first time I've seen the documentary and it's one I I think about all time.
So each vendor
that Jiro uses. Again, these are just like simple
Ideas.
handful of simple principles, but he he he applies them relentlessly and vigorously over a long period of time. So each of his vendor
has to be the best vendor for that specific ingredient. So for example.
That obviously he's obsessed with with focus, right?
The tuna vendor works exclusively with tuna.
The shrimp vendor only sells shrimp.
Each of them this is how they describe it.
Each of the vendors are specialists in their fields. We are experts in sushi, but in each of their special uh specialties, the vendors are more knowledgeable.
We have built up a relationship of trust with them. So
Mr. Beast is the biggest creator in the world.
He listens to founders. He invited me to actually
uh go to where his headquarters are. And I actually sat in a bunch of meetings. It was very fascinating.
And again, one of you know, he's he's gonna go down with one of history's greatest obsessive too. He's like completely obsessed with what he's doing just the way Giro is, just the way Bernard O'Neill is, just the way Walt Disney was.
And what I learned that day was
The way that Mr B sets up his business is like this.
So every person
is focused on one thing that they are the best in the world at that one thing.
So like the the the person that does thumbnails.
the best thumbnail designer in the world. That's all he focuses on.

The video editor.
The person that's responsible for the onset operations. Every person is focused on one thing and they are best in the world at that one thing.
That's exactly what Jiro does with the ingredients for his product.
So they they they they interview his tuna dealer, which is hilarious.
He's got a tuna dealer.
He's got a race dealer.
This is what the tuna dealer says.
My methods and standards are unusual compared to other vendors.
I'm what you might call anti establishment.
Later on.
In the documentary.
Jira refers to himself as a rebel.
You know, these are people that are
very comfortable thinking for themselves and inventing new ways to perfect their craft. So
Tuna dealer, the best tuna dealer that in Japan.
He's saying I'm anti savagement.
I either buy my first choice or I buy nothing.
If ten tune are for sale
Only one can be the best.
So I buy that one.
And if he can't buy that one, he buys nothing at all.
Their standards will never be compromised.
So then they interview the octopus.
And the shrimp vendors.
And they are shoken in too. In many cases they're they're
They've been doing it for decades. These are older people.
This is what
They said we are picky about who we sell to.
We want customers who appreciate good fish.
Even at my age, I'm discovering new techniques. Never says his age.
I would I I by looking at the guy, I thought he was maybe like sixty years old. But when you think this is fascinating what he says here.
Even at my age, I'm discovering new techniques.
But just when you think you know it all, you realize that you're just
Fooling yourself.
And then you get depressed. There is one of my favorite quotes.
Again, that I have stored on my phone.
from Mickey.
The baseball player.
And he says it's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life. I have this weird obsession with talking to older entrepreneurs, obviously, like
I like people that have decades and decades of experience.
And you know, my favorite entrepreneurs, the most impressive entrepreneurs that I've ever met and spent time with.
in in all cases, you know, tens of billions of dollars of net worth.
just insane scale to what they're doing.
But they're all over seventy.
And they talk about this. In many cases they've been running one in one case I I talked to a person that was seventy six.
He's been working in the family business since he was six, so he had seventy years of experience.
Another case.
Uh they they were running their business for forty five years.
Most of them are these like private, you know, family held businesses you've probably never even heard of.
And they tend to just secretly dominate
An inner sheet, but they say the exact same thing that
Like they they're never gonna retire.
And they're still learning. They're
four, five, six decades into what they're doing and they're still learning.
New things.
Just when you think you know it all, you realize that you're fooling yourself.
And then the shrimp vendor actually says something that I thought there's like a lot of embedded in what, you know, this casual conversations. There's actually a lot of wisdom in what he's saying.
He says so he says, Sometimes when I see the shrimp in the morning I say, Oh, this is worthy of Jiro.
That's the way I do business. It's not about the money. These days the first things people want is an easy job.
Then they want a lot of free time.
And then they want lots of money.
But they aren't
Thinking of building
Their skills. So again.
This is what jumped out to me. And I I think it was like the fourth time
that I I saw the video that I actually realized or the documentary when I actually realized it's like when you what you realize about Juro is
His belief
That competence is the only safe harbor.
So a skill that no one else can take from you, you need to develop. Why?
If you were one of the greatest sushi chefs.
You will never go.
Hungry.
And starving to death was a very real possibility when Jiro was a kid, which I'll get to in a minute.
the the shrimp vendor continues. When you work at a place like Giro's
You are committing to a trade for life.
Most people can't kip up.
With the hard work and they quit.
So then they've talked about the fact that Giro
Re received three Michelin stars. So
If you haven't listened to it, this is a few weeks ago, episode three ninety three.
It's on the Michelin Brothers.
I've heard from many people that have listened to over a hundred episodes of Founders. They think that is a tep ten
Founders episode of all time. So
The first Michelin guide, if you listen to the episode you already know this, count comes in uh came out in nineteen hundred.
I don't think they get to the Japan until like two thousand seven and then as soon as they get there, they're like Jiro's insane. This guy's like the the only
possible rating for this restaurant is three stars.
So says Michelin inspectors first look for quality.
Next they look for originality and finally they look for consistency.
Giro's restaurant easily.
meets these standards a perfect three star Michelin rating means that it's worth making a trip to that country just to eat at that restaurant.
When Giro got three stars, everyone was astonished. They were named all the stuff it didn't have.
There's only ten seats.
The restroom is outside the premises.
There is no other three star restaurant in the world like Giro's.
But the Michelin investors in investigators say no matter how many times you eat a Giro's, the sushi there is incredible.
They said that three stars is the only at rating adequate
For this restaurant.
They said I've never had a disappointing experience there.
That is nothing short

So again,
This is gonna sound really funny.
If you think about
I when I got to this section, I thought of Todd Graves.
who's the founder of Race and Kaynes. That's episode three eighty three.
I think the title of that episode is you know, Todd Graves and his ten billion dollar chicken finger dream.
That
Titles outdated.
Now the the his company that he owns over ninety percent of is worth twenty billion dollars, twenty five years into Todd Gray's career.
His business is growing faster than it's ever grown before, and Todd Graves lives.
By a simple model.
Uh motto, rather.
He says I believe in doing one thing and doing it better than anyone else.
That's exact so at the very high end, right, where you're spending twenty five dollars a minute, Jiro would say the same thing. I believe in doing one thing and doing better than anyone else.
That works to high end. It also works.
On the other end of the spectrum.
Raising canes, it's my favorite fried chicken. It's fast food.
And I've never had a disappointing experience at raising canes either.
Todd Graves, Jiro, they did the same thing. They limited the
They limited the amount of details to perfect and they made every single detail perfect. I've eaten a raisin cane's I don't know.
A hundred times.
Not a single bad
Experience. Now another main theme of the story is the fact that
Two of Jiro's apprentices are his sons. So in Japan it says the older son is expected to take over the family business.
That's the one that actually served me. Giro wasn't there. He's in poor health from what I hear. And his
oldest son has been apprenticing with Jiro since he's nine since
He was nineteen, I think he's in his seventies by now.
And then Giro's younger son
opened his own sushi restaurant, which is like a mirror image.
of Giro's restaurant just at a lower price. And that w winds up getting a two star
Michelin.
But
There's a part in the in the documentary I wanna bring up to you where Giro and his son are sitting next to each other in in
They're having this conversation.
And you'll see how Jiro thinks about things.
So Jero's son says when I opened this restaurant, my father said
Now you have no home to come back to.
He said that it would be buried
in Rapongi, which is where the restaurant is.
Failure.
He said was not an option.
Gro explaining his his
The way he thinks about this.
When you open your own restaurant.
You need to be tough.
I told him to leave and open this restaurant because I knew he could do it.
If he wasn't ready.
I wouldn't have made him go.
But I felt he was ready, so I gave him a gentle push out the door.
But I told him there is no turning back.
You must make your own way.
When I say things like this, people often disagree.
Бо він а лет хом і аж в на.
That's what I was told.
When I was
This is so crazy.
When I was in the first grade, I was told you have no home to come back to. Go back to what I just said. If you look at everything through
d this crazy experience that happened to him kicked out of his house
His dad's a you know, poor
And a drunk loses all his money.
Dir was forced.
To support himself starting at nine.
But when I left so it makes perfect sense why he was so obsessed with getting a skill
So he doesn't have to sleep under a bridge so he can actually feed himself.
When I was in the first grade I was told you have no home to come back to
That's why you have to work hard.
I knew that I was on my own and I didn't want to have to sleep.
At the temple.
Or under a bridge.
So I had to work just to survive.
That has never
left me. I'm gonna pause there.
Think about Leonardo Dovecchio, the founder of Luxotica.
He built a business valued well over a hundred billion dollars. Mark Zuckerberg just paid I think three billion.
Three and a half billion to buy three percent of it.
You have Giro saying
I didn't want to sleep under a bridge.
So I had to work just to survive. That has never left me.
Del Vecchio said in his biography.
I grew up in an institution
And without a family.
That marks you.
It is the same exact idea.
And the response
to these two people that didn't knew each other know each other, lived at different times, worked in different industries, and in different parts of the world was exactly the same.
That is why Munger said you have to tie the ideas to the personality
That developed them. That is why Charlie Munger, who could have learned from anybody else in the world.
chose to read hundreds of biographies in his lifetime back to Gerald.
I worked even if the boss kicked or slapped me.
Nowadays parents tell their children you can return if it doesn't work out.
When parents say stupid things like that.
The kids turn out to be failures.
I don't know much about my father. He made good money taking people on boat rides.
But then his business failed and his life
Fell apart.
Again, a great sushi chef.
Will never go hungry. What if I just develop
A skill set that no one could take from me.
And then do that decade after decade till he is the best in the world at what he does. Go back to this.
But his business failed and his life fell apart.
All he did was drink.
I heard that he died.
I didn't go to the funeral.
I lived with him until I was seven.
I never heard from him again.
I was on my own.
After
That's
So think about that.
Seven.
Seven, you're old enough. It doesn't matter if you're an adult. You have memories from when you're seven.
Giro kept these memories with him his entire life.
So then you fast forward, that's how he grew up.
Then he starts talking to his kids now. They do a great job of documentary this.
Now his kids are talking about how they grew up.
Our father started out as an apprentice and was paid almost nothing.
According to our mother mother
When they got married, they had only ten yen in their bank account. That's like less than a dollar.
That is how poor we were.
They then tell a story when they were little kids and Coca-Cola comes to Japan.
For the first time ever.
They had to save for months to buy one can of Coca-Cola.
That was the economic conditions of Giro when he starts his family. Now he has people flying all over the world.

Four hundred dollars for fifteen minutes.
Giro talks about this time in his life. When the kids were small, on the rare occasion that I was at home sleeping in on a Sunday,
They'd come into the room and say, Mom, there's a strange man sleeping in our house.
It is a true story. I would get up at five in the morning and go to work.
I would get home after ten at night when they'd be asleep.
When they were young, I didn't get to see them often. I wasn't much of a father.
I was probably more
Like a stranger. And so if you really think about this.
Giro's
He's describing trying to make it in his trade, right?
Giro's training.
The one he went through and then the one he put other people through. It's the opposite of an overnight success. So they called it like they said he labored through
The classic sushi apprenticeship.
Gauntlet.
So you start from cleaning, then you do prep work.
To eventually being able to handle fish.
After years of proving your dedication.
So he starts working restaurants when he's nine.
He's
Thirty nine. It takes him thirty years.
before he opens his first restaurant.
That is the restaurant that still exists to this day, the one that is still thriving to this day.
And so then he's talking about what it was like when he was in his early twenties. We came back to work after World War Two.
The masters said that the history of sushi is so long
Then nothing new could be invented.
They may have mastered their craft, but there's always room for improvement.
I created sushi dishes that never existed back then.
I would make sushi.
In my dreams.
Good luck competing with somebody that's dreaming about their work.
I would jump out of bed at night with ideas. This is spooky.
Think about this. Think about what's been going on the the last few episodes that you and I have been talking about.
Leonardo Vecchio did this.
Michael Ferrero did this. Colin Chapman. They literally say that same thing. They had so many ideas, they would wake up.
They'd either have a tape recorder next to their bed or a pen and pad.
They were dreaming about their work. They would jump out of bed at night with ideas, just like what Jira's saying.
And then the way he developed these ideas, what is it? It's very basic.
Countless iterations over decades. How many people are going to w willing to do
Thousands.
Tens of thousands of experiments in your particular craft.
Right from the rip. That's gonna eliminate ninety nine point nine nine percent of the people in any in any an endeavor.
Every day Jiro is just in there making constant iterations on trying to figure out how to improve things. And I'm just gonna give you a few examples.
So they talk about how they used to serve shrimp. He's like, Well, I just when I started out, I just did shrimp how everybody else did.
Like everyone else, we just boil in the morning and then we put it in the refrigerator.
And then we took it out when it was time to surf.
And he says something that's fasting. He says it was a lot easier back then. He's always like, Oh, I'm just I'm taking the easy way out, but I can actually improve this process.
Now we wait to boil the shrimp until the customer arrives. It's more work, but it's worth it.
Octopus is another example. I always felt that my preparation was decent, but I've since refined my technique. Back then I would massage the octopus for about thirty minutes, which is still much longer than what anybody else does, right? But it's the volume, volume, volume.
Now it's massage for forty or fifty minutes. We massage it to give it a softer texture.
He does this for everything he does, and he's t he again, he refers to himself as a Shokanan.
Shoken and tried to get the highest quality fish and apply their technique to it.
All I want to do is make better sushi.
I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit.
There is always a yearning to achieve more.
I'll continue to climb trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is.
Even at my age.
After decades of work.
I do not think I have achieved perfection.
But I feel ecstatic.
All day.
I love
Making sushi.
That is the spirit.
of the Shokanin.
I have never once hated this job.
I fell in love with my work and gave my life to it.
Even though I'm eighty five years old, I don't feel like retiring.
That's how I feel.
And then another part of being a shoken is you have to pass what you know on to the next generation.
And in this case it's thro decades of apprenticeship.
So it says when you work for Giro, who teaches you for free.
But you have to endure ten years of training.
If you persevere for ten years, you will acquire the skills to be recognized.
As a first rate chef.
When you first sit down as a customer juros, they give you a hot towel.
Well those towels are prepared by hand.
So an apprentice must first be able to properly hand squeeze a towel.
At first
The tows are so hot.

Hand.
And this part was fascinating. It is a very painful training which is very Japanese.
Until you can adequately squeeze a towel
They won't let you touch the fish.
Then you learn to cut and prepare the fish.
After about ten years, they let you cook the eggs. And so one of the apprentices they interview one of the uh Jair's apprentices.
And he talks about the fact that they were trying to teach him how to make egg sushi.
And it was just iteration after iteration after iteration, they would just reject over and over again. He says I made over two hundred
Every single one was rejected.
When I finally did make a good one, Giro said
Now this is how it should be done.
And he did that by tasting it. Again, I'm gonna read
I'm going in order the documentary. This guy repeats the same stuff over and over again, these same ideas. It's taking a simple idea, find a simple idea, and take it very seriously.
And this is what Jira says in order to make delicious food, you must eat delicious food.
In order to make delicious food, you must eat delicious food.
You need to develop a palette capable
of discerning good and bad.
Without good taste, you cannot make good food.
And then he talks about people that he admires.
And again, there's all these other chefs in all these profiles I read on Jiro that are in the documentary.
They admire him and then he's talking about well like
I'm not even close to what this guy is. When I think of someone with a highly acute sense of taste and smell, the first person I think of is the great French chef.
Joel Rubishon.
I wish I were as sensitive as h.
I have a very good sense of smell.
But he's on another level.
His sensitivity is very high.
If I had his tongue and nose.
I could probably make
Better food.
And so then they go into the fact that if you're doing these experiments constantly, saying a couple, you know, dozens or maybe hundreds, maybe even a thousand a week.
You that week after week after decade after decade, you're gonna develop
uh a certain process that is going to be much better than anybody else's. So there's this
him and his rice dealer, which is just hilarious, that he has his own rice dealer, who doesn't sell to anybody else, which is also interesting to me.
They start to have this conversation.
And Giro again brings up the fact that
When you've seen, you know, what did Bernard Bernard O'Neau's son say? You might my father has said.
have seen tens of thousands of stores. So of course he he he knows what's good just because he has this volume to compare to.
And so Giro
has gone through how many different people have tried to sell him rights.
He's talking about his race dealer, the best in the world at what he does. He knows everything about rice.
He's different from the other rice dealers.
And so
The rice dealer talks about uh one of the nicest hotels.
In uh in Tokyo's the Grand Hyatt.
They try to they wanted to get the same rice that Jiro that Jiro uses.
And he told him even if I wanted to sell it to you, you wouldn't know what to do it because only Jiro knows how to cook it. And so then
Giro's describing
essentially what he learned from these thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of iteration. It takes significant skill

What is the point of buying rice that you can't cook?
And so they show the process.
They were fine to cook rice in the documentary.
We put a lot of pressure on the rice. The lid itself is so heavy that it takes two hands to lift.
And then we place a big pot of water on top of that.
With the type of rice we use, you need a lot of pressure.
I cannot think of a single restaurant that puts this much pressure
On the race.
But that's fine with us.
Because we can keep using the best rice and our rivals
won't be able to imitate us.
He talks about down to not only the pressure.
But the temperature's so important.
The temperature of the rice is very important. Most people think sushi is cold.
But actually the rice to be served.
At body temperature.
To maintain the perfect temperature when serving and it shows this in the documentary as well.
The temperature and the freshness of the fish is crucial.
Each ingredient has an ideal moment of deliciousness.
That is a really important part. I don't want to skip over this part. This is why
the meal at Jiro goes so fast.
He puts it on your plate and you need to eat it right away. You have like ten seconds.
The temperature and the freshness of the fish is crucial.
Each ingredient has an ideal moment of deliciousness.
Mastering the timey
Timing of sushi.
It's difficult.
It takes years of experience to develop your intuition.
The sushi must be eaten immediately.
After it's served.
Jiro then expounds on this. I love hearing Masters of Their Craft.
Describe the craft.
To explain umami, it takes more than just a good piece of tuna.
To create the sensation of umami.
The umami is brought out through the balance of the flavors.
The most important part of making good sushi is this.
Creating a union between the rice and the fish.
If they are not in complete harmony
The sushi will not taste good.
There is an ebb and flow to the menu, so Giro's sushi courses.
They say it's like a concerto.
And they say they compare him over and over again to like the uh the maestro, the the one that conducts the orchestra. There are dynamics in the way the sushi is served.
Just like in music, you're consuming Giro's philosophy with every bite.
He watches
His diners very closely.
If for example detail
Uh there's another great line in one of the profiles I read that says every detail is calibrated.
If Jiro notices a guest losing his using his left hand
The next piece of sushi will be placed on the left side.
More than seven decades into his career, Giro is making more sushi now than ever.
Giro is the oldest chef to have been warded.
Three stars by Michelin.
Nobody in their eighties is working day and night like Jiro.
This is one of my favorite stories about Giro.
Jiro was given the Miko Award by the Japanese government.
He went to the award ceremony during the day and was back at work in the evening.
He got tired, he said he got tired of sitting around.
One of my favorite biographies.
and really favorite founders I've ever come across. This is a guy named Sam Zamur.
The biography is called the fish that ate the whale.
There's a story in that book that I never forgot that when I got to this part of the transcript I actually pulled.
Yeah, it's it's I think it perfectly cap
Captures.
the personality types of these kind of people.
So it says uh Zamuri was being honored at a reception in Havana, Cuba.
A party w which was thrown specifically for him.
So Murray didn't even show up.
When a lieutenant was sent to track him down, they found him at the port.
Going over manifest documents with the ship's purser.
This exemplifies Zamuri's complete dedication to his work over social recognition.
And to take a line from Warren Buff and Charlie Marter, it's the most inner scorecard
behavior possible.
You're so focused on the actual work that you skip.
That you skip your own honor ceremony to review shipping documents. Again, it's hard to compete people that love
They have a love for the activity itself. This is m prime my f my my favorite line in the entire
Documentary.
When we have good few good tuna, I feel great.
When I'm making the sushi I feel while I'm making sushi, I feel victorious.
That's how it makes me feel.
Until the end I only want to work with the best fish.
Now it was very fascinating.
He goes back to where he grew up, and this is towards the end of the documentary.
And it's it's just, you know, it's obviously something devastating.
To have to go through, to have to experience.
And then it's remarkable if you think about what he experienced to what he achieved.
And so he visits his parents' grave and they they they they show this on on camera.
And he says something that's
Completely heartbreaking.
says I don't know why I come here.
My parents didn't take care of me.
And he worked all the time when his kids
We're younger, but he actually gets to work and see his kids his entire life.
And he talked about how important that was.
to him as a father. He says, I want both of my sons to continue on.
They both will run their own restaurants.
I will admit I trained my sons more strictly than other apprentices, but I did so for the sake of their future.
Not because I wanted to be mean to them.
It's something that I thought about from the beginning.
Even if I were to be gone right now, I know they can go.
On.
And then this is the perfect way to end. If you really think about what he's saying here, it's not up to him.
I will keep working and keep practicing my craft until my body gives out and then he just ends with excellent advice.
If I don't keep working my body will become worthless. If my body stops functioning
Then I'll have to quit.
It's not up to me.
If I stopped working at eighty five, I'd be bored out of my mind.
I have been able to carry on with the same job for seventy five years.
It's hard slowed down.
This is what's most important. Always look ahead and above yourself.
Always try to improve on yourself.
Always strive.
To elevate
Your craft.