TED Publication

TED 1984–2014

First Published 2014 Text and deisgn copywright Š 2014 ted Layout copywright Š 2014 Faith Nelson All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or trasmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 787-1-9834-4

TED2014 One Hundred

ted is a small non-profit organisation devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual ted Conference in Long Beach, California, and the tedGlobal conferences, ted includes the award-winning Talks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new tedx community program, this year’s tedIndia Conference and the annual ted Prize. In addition to these annual events there are the tedGlobal conferences, ted includes the award-winning tedTalks video site, the tedx community program and the annual ted Prize.

On ted.com, the best talks and performances from ted and partners are made available to the world, for free. More than 1500 tedTalks are now available, by the end of 2012 tedTalks had been viewed one billion times worldwide! The 2014 conference in Vancouver celebrates ted’s 30th anniversary.

TED Conferences LCC 250 Hudson St. Suite 1002 New York, NY 10013 212.346.9333 Tel. 212.227.6397 Fax. Designed by Faith Nelson.

TED2014 One Hundred: One Hundred of the Greatest Talks

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Contents

2002

1.

2.

3.

2003

Stephen Petranek: 10 ways the world could end Frank Gehry: A master architect asks, Now what?

Stephan Van Dam: Talks Maps

4.

5.

2

David Carson: Design and discovery Vik Muniz: Art with wire, sugar, chocolate and string

2004

6.

7.

8.

2005

Larry Page: The genesis of Google Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness James Howard Kunstler: The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Iqbal Quadir: How mobile phones can fight poverty Richard Dawkins: Why the universe seems so strange Aubrey de Grey: A roadmap to end aging Robert Fischell: Three unusual medical inventions Eve Ensler: What security means to me Anna Deavere Smith: Four American characters Sir Martin Rees: Is this our final century?

Bjørn Lomborg: Global priorities bigger than climate change Amory Lovins: Winning the oil endgame Jacqueline Novogratz: Invest in Africa’s own solutions Ross Lovegrove: Organic design, inspired by nature William McDonough: Cradle to cradle design

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2006

21. Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do 22. Rick Warren: A life of purpose 23. Nicholas Negroponte: One Laptop per Child 24. Jehane Noujaim: A global day of film 25. Peter Gabriel: Fight injustice with raw video 26. Richard Baraniuk: Goodbye, text books; hello, open-source learning 27. Cameron Sinclair: A call for opensource architecture

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2007

28. Richard Branson: Life at 30,000 feet 29. Bill Clinton: My wish, Rebuilding Rwanda 30. Malcolm Gladwell: We Can Learn From Spaghetti Sauce 31. Zeresenay Alemseged: Humanity’s roots 32. Deborah Scranton: An Iraq war movie crowd-sourced from soldiers 33. Steven Pinker: The surprising decline in violence 34. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: Aid versus trade 35. Franco Sacchi: A tour of Nollywood 36. John Q. Walker: Great piano performances, recreated 37. Philippe Starck: Design and destiny 38. J. J. Abrams: The Mystery Box 39. William Kamkwamba: How I built a windmill 40. James Nachtwey: Let my photographs bear witness

2008

41. Curtis Wong: A preview of the World Wide Telescope 42. Stephen Hawking: Questioning the universe 43. Christopher de Charms: A look inside the brain in real time 44. Antony Garrett Lisi: A theory of everything 45. Karen Armstrong: The Charter for Compassion 46. Neil Turok: Find the next Einstein in Africa 47. Dennis van Engelsdorp: A plea for bees 48. Dave Eggers: Once Upon a School 49. Paula Scher: Great design is serious, not solemn 50. Benjamin Zander: The transformative power of classical music 51. George Smoot: The design of the universe 52. Chris Jordan: Turning powerful stats into art 53. John Maeda: My journey in design

2009

54. Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness 55. Jim Stolze: Can you live without the Internet 56. Jill Tarter: A new way to fund space exploration 57. Romulus Whitaker: The real danger lurking in the water 58. Marcus du Sautoy: Symmetry, reality’s riddle 59. Mathieu Lehanneur: Science-inspired design 60. Daniel H. Pink: The puzzle of motivation 61. Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off 62. Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: Wonder.

Wonders.

63. Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

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2009

64. Pranav Mistry: Meet the SixthSense interaction 65. Jim Fallon: Exploring the mind of a killer 66. David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation 67. David Blaine: How I held my breath for 17 min.

68. Joshua Prince-Ramus: Building a theater that remakes itself 69. Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+ 70. Bertrand Piccard: My solar-powered adventure 71. Bill Gates: Mosquitos, malaria and education 72. Al Gore: What comes after An Inconvenient Truth?

73. Steven Cowley: Fusion is energy’s future 74. Edward Burtynsky: Photographing the landscape of oil 75. Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story 76. James Balog: Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss 77. Ed Ulbrich: How Benjamin Button got his face 78. Herbie Hancock: An all-star set 79. JosÊ Antonio Abreu: Kids Transformed

by Music

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2010

80. Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world 81. Tim Jackson: An economic reality check 82. Johanna Blakley: Social media and the end of gender 83. Nicholas Christakis: How social networks predict epidemics 84. Anders Ynnerman: Visualizing the medical data explosion 85. Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds 86. Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work 87. Jamie Oliver: Teach every child about food 88. Larry Lessig: Re-examining the remix 89. Seth Godin: This is broken

2011

2012

2013

94. Brian Greene: Is our universe the only universe?

95. Cameron Carpenter: Transforming energy into music 96. Plan B: Youth, music and London 97. Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence 98. Chris Anderson: Why can’t we see evidence of alien life?

90.

91.

92.

93.

Pamela Meyer: How to spot a liar David Christian: The history of our world in 18 minutes Salman Khan: Let’s use video to reinvent education Bjarke Ingels: Hedonistic sustainability 99. Eduardo Dolhun: The importance of Oral Rehydration Solutions 100. Bono: The good news on poverty (Yes, there’s good news)

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“ Sign me up for next year.”

—Al Gore, Activist

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2002

9

“ Words are inadequate to express my appreciation for the invitation to participate at the TED conference. It was one of the highlights of my entire life.”

—Billy Graham, Evangelist

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2003

39

“ It was our first time. It was like drinking from a firehose.”

—Jay Dedman, ant

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2004

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2004 – Larry Page

Larry Page

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Lawrence “Larry” Page, born in 1973, is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who is the co-founder of Google, alongside Sergey Brin.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met in grad school at Stanford in the mid-’90s, and in 1996 started working on a search technology based on a new idea: that relevant results come from context. Their technology analyzed the number of times a given website was linked to by other sites — assuming that the more links, the more relevant the site — and ranked sites accordingly.

In 1998, they opened Google in a garage-office in Menlo Park. In 1999 their software left beta and started its steady rise to web domination.

Brin and Page’s innovation-friendly office culture has created fertile ground for spectacular successes beyond search, including AdSense/ AdWords, Google News, Google Maps, Google Earth, and Gmail. The company’s belief in clean design and ethical ad sales, and its corporate philosophy — often simply stated as “Don’t be evil” — continue to set the company apart.

In 2011, Page stepped back into his original role of chief executive officer and as of 2013, Page’s personal wealth is estimated to be $20.3 billion, ranking him #13 on the Forbes 400 list of the 400 richest Americans. He now leads Google with high aims and big thinking, but still finds time to devote to his pet projects

like Google X, the idea lab for the out-there experiments that keep Google pushing the limits.

Awards •

• • •

In 2002, Page was named as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35 In 2003, Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School In 2004, Page was elected to the National Academy of Engineering In 2009, Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan during graduation commencement ceremonies

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2004 – Larry Page

the genesis of google by larry page

Sergey Brin: I want to discuss a question I know that’s been pressing on many of your minds. We spoke to you last several years ago. And before I get started today, since many of you are wondering, I just wanted to get it out of the way. The answer is boxers. Now I hope all of you feel better.

Do you know what this might be? Does anyone know what that is?

Audience: Yes. SB: What is it?

Audience: It’s people logging on to Google around the world.

SB: Wow, OK. I didn’t really realize what it was when I first saw it. But this is what helped me see it. This is what we run at the office, that actually runs real time. Here it’s slightly logged. But here you can see around the world how people are using Google. And every one of those rising dots represents probably about 20, 30 searches, or something like that. And they’re labeled by color right now, by language.

So you can see: here we are in the U.S., and they’re all coming up red. There we are in Monterey – hopefully I can get it right. You can see that Japan is busy at night, right there. We have Tokyo coming in in Japanese. There’s a lot of activity in China. There’s a lot of activity in

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India. There’s some in the Middle East, the little pockets. And Europe, which is right now in the middle of the day, is going really strong with a whole wide variety of languages.

Now you can also see, if I turn this around here – hopefully I won’t shake the world too much. But you can also see, there are places where there’s not so much. Australia, because there just aren’t very many people there. And this is something that we should really work on, which is Africa, which is just a few trickles, basically in South Africa and a few other urban cities. But basically, what we’ve noticed is these queries, which come in at thousands per second, are available everywhere there is power. And pretty much everywhere there is power, there is the Internet. And even in Antarctica – well, at least this time of year – we from time to time will see a query rising up. And if we had it plotted correctly, I think the International Space Station would have it, too.

So this is some of the challenge that we have here, is you can see that it’s actually kind of hard to get the – there we go. This is how we have to move the bits around to actually get the people the answers to their questions. You can see that there’s a lot of data running around.

It has to go all over the world: through fibers, through satellites, through all kinds of connections. And it’s pretty tricky for us to maintain the latencies as low as we try to.

Hopefully your experience is good. But you can see also, once again – so some places are much more wired than others, and you can see all the bandwidth across the U.S., going up over to Asia, Europe in the other direction, and so forth.

Now what I would like to do is just to show you what one second of this activity would look like. And if we can switch to slides – all right, here we go. So this is slowed down.

This is what one second looks like. And this is what we spend a lot of our time doing, is just making sure that we can keep up with this kind of traffic load. Now, each one of those queries has an interesting life and tale of its own. I mean, it could be somebody’s health, it could be somebody’s career, something important to them. And it could potentially be something as important as tomato sauce, or in this case, ketchup.

So this is a query that we had – I guess it’s a popular band that was more popular in some parts of the world than others. You can see that it got started right here. In the U.S. and Spain, it was popular at the same time. But it didn’t have quite the same pickup in the U.S. as it did in Spain. And then from Spain, it went to Italy, and then Germany got excited, and maybe right now the U.K. is enjoying it. And so I guess the U.S. finally, finally started to like it, too. And I just wanted to play it for you.

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2004 – Larry Page

Anyway, you can all enjoy it for yourselves – hopefully that search will work. As a part of – you know, part of what we want to do to grow our company is to have more searches. And what that means is we want to have more people who are healthy and educated. More animals, if they start doing searches as well. But partly, we want to make the world a better place, and so one thing that we’re embarking upon is the Google Foundation, and we’re in the process of setting that up.

We also have a program already called Google Grants that now serves over 150 different charities around the world, and these are some of the charities that are on there. And it’s something I’m very excited to be a part of.

In fact, many of the organizations that are here – the Acumen Fund, I think Approtec we have running, I’m not sure if that one’s up yet – and many of the people who have presented here are running through Google Grants. They run Google ads, and we just give them the ad credit so they can let organizations know.

One of the earlier results that we got – we have a Singaporean businessman who is now sponsoring a village of 25 Vietnamese girls for their education, and that was one of the earliest results. And as I said, now there have been many, many stories that have come in, because we do have hundreds of charities in there, and

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the Google Foundation will be an even broader endeavor. Now does anybody know who this is?

Audience: Orkut.

SB: Yes! Somebody got it. This is Orkut. Is anybody here on Orkut? Do we have any? Okay, not very many people know about it. I’ll explain it in a second. This is one of our engineers. We find that they work better when they’re submerged and covered with leaves. That’s how we churn those products out. Orkut had a vision to create a social network. I know all of you are thinking, “Yet another social network.”

But it was a dream of his, and we, basically, when people really want to do something, well, we generally let them. So this is what he built.

We just released it in a test phase last month, and it’s been taking off.

This is our VP of Engineering. You can see the red hair, and I don’t know if you can see the nose ring there. And these are all of his friends. So this is how – we just deployed it – we just decided that people would send each other invitations to get into the service, and so we just had the people in our company initially send them out. And now we’ve grown to over 100,000 members. And they spread, actually, very quickly, even outside the U.S.

You can see, even though the U.S. is still the majority here – though, by the way,

search-wise, it’s only about 30 percent of our traffic – but it’s already going to Japan, and the U.K., and Europe, and all the rest of the countries. So it’s a fun little project. There are a variety of demographics. I won’t bore you with these. But it’s just the kind of thing that we just try out for fun and see where it goes. And – well, I’ll leave you in suspense. Larry, you can explain this one.

Larry Page: Thank you, Sergey. So one of the things – both Sergey and I went to a Montessori school, and I think, for some reason, this has been incorporated in Google. And Sergey mentioned Orkut, which is something that, you know, Orkut wanted to do in his time, and we call this – at Google, we’ve embodied this as “the 20 percent time,” and the idea is, for 20 percent of your time, if you’re working at Google, you can do what you think is the best thing to do. And many, many things at Google have come out of that, such as Orkut and also Google News. And I think many other things in the world also have come out of this. Mendel, who was supposed to be teaching high-school students, actually, you know, discovered the laws of genetics – as a hobby, basically. So many, many useful things come out of this.

And News, which I just mentioned, was started by a researcher. And he just – he – after 9/11, he got really interested in the news. And

he said, “Why don’t I look at the news better?”

And so he started clustering it by category, and then he started using it, and then his friends started using it. And then, besides just looking cute on a baby’s bottom, we made it a Googlette, which is basically a small project at Google.

So it’d be like three people, or something like that, and they would try to make a product.

And we wouldn’t really be sure if it’s going to work or not. And in News’ case, you know, they had a couple of people working on it for a while, and then more and more people started using it, and then we put it out on the Internet, and more and more people started using it. And now it’s a real, full-blown project with more people on it. And this is how we keep our innovation running.

“ People like to work on things that are important…”

I think usually, as companies get bigger, they find it really hard to have small, innovative projects. And we had this problem, too, for a while, and we said, “Oh, we really need a new concept.” You know, the Googlettes – that’s a small project that we’re not quite sure if it’s going to work or not, but we hope it will, and if we do enough of them, some of them will really work and turn out, such as News.

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2004 – Larry Page

But then we had a problem because then we had over 100 projects. And I don’t know about all of you, but I have trouble keeping 100 things in my head at once. And we found that if we just wrote all of them down and ordered them – and these are kind of made up. Don’t really pay attention to them. For example, the “Buy Iceland” was from a media article. We would never do such a crazy thing, but – in any case, we found if we just basically wrote them all down and ordered them, that most people would actually agree what the ordering should be. And this was kind of a surprise to me, but we found that as long as you keep the 100 things in your head, which you did by writing them down, that you could do a pretty good job deciding what to do and where to put your resources. And so that’s basically what we’ve done since we instituted that a few years ago, and I think it has really allowed us to be innovative and still stay reasonably well-organized.

The other thing we discovered is that people like to work on things that are important, and so naturally, people sort of migrate to the things that are high priorities. I just wanted to highlight a couple of things that are new, or you might not know about. And the top thing, actually, is the Deskbar. So this is a new – how many of you use the Google Toolbar? Raise your hands.

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How many of you use the Deskbar? All right, see? You guys should try it out. But if you go to our site and search for “Deskbar,” you’ll get this. And the idea is, instead of a toolbar, it’s just present all the time on your screen on the bottom, and you can do searches really easily.

And it’s sort of like a better version of the toolbar. Thank you, Sergey.

This is another example of a project that somebody at Google was really passionate about, and they just, they got going, and it’s really, really a great product, and really taking off.

Google Answers is something we started, which is really cool, which lets you – for five to 100 dollars, you can type a question in, and then there’s a pool of researchers that go out and research it for you, and it’s guaranteed and all that, and you can get actually very good answers to things without spending all that time yourself.

Froogle lets you search shopping information, and Blogger lets you publish things. But all of these – well, these were all sort of innovative things that we did that – you know, we try many, many different things in our company. We also like to innovate in our physical space, and we noticed in meetings, you know, you have to wait a long time for projectors to turn on and off, and they’re noisy, so people shut them off. And we didn’t like that, so we actually, in maybe a couple of weeks, we

built these little enclosures that enclosed the projectors, and so we can leave them on all the time and they’re completely silent. And as a result, we were able to build some software that also lets us manage a meeting, so when you walk into a meeting room now, it lists all the meetings that are happening, you can very easily take notes, and they just get emailed automatically to all the people that were present in the meeting.

And as we become more of a global company, we find these things really affect us – you know, can we work effectively with people who aren’t in the room? And things like that.

And simple things like this can really make a big difference. We also have a lot of engineers in those meetings, and they don’t always do their laundry as much as they should. And so we found it was pretty helpful to have laundry machines, for our younger employees especially, and ... we also allow dogs and things like that, and we’ve had, I think, a really fun culture at our company, which helps people work and enjoy what they’re doing.

This is actually our “cult picture.” I just wanted to show quickly. We had this on our website for a while, but we found that after we put it on our website, we didn’t get any job applications anymore. But anyway, every year we’ve taken the whole company on a ski trip. A lot of work happens in companies from people

knowing each other, and informally. And I think we’ve done a good job encouraging that. It makes it a really fun place to work.

Along with our logos, too, which I think really embody our culture when we change things. In the early days, we were actually advised we should never change our logo because we should establish our brand, you know, because, you know, you’d never want to change your logo. You want it to be consistent.

And we said, “Well, that doesn’t sound so much fun. Why don’t we try changing it every day?”

One of the things that really excites me about what we’re doing now is we have this thing called AdSense, and this is a little bit foreshadowing – this is from before Dean dropped out. But the idea is, like, on a newspaper, for example, we show you relevant ads. And this is hard to read, but this says “Battle for New Hampshire: Howard Dean for President” – articles on Howard Dean. And these ads are generated automatically – like in this case, on the Washington Post – from the content on the site. And so we use our over 150,000 advertisers and millions of advertisements, so we pick the one that’s most relevant to what you’re actually looking at, much as we do on search. So the idea is we can make advertising useful, not just annoying, right?

And the nice thing about this, we have a self-serve program, and many thousands of

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2004 – Larry Page

websites have signed up, and this let’s them really make money. And I – you know, there’s a number of people I met – I met this guy who runs a conservation site at a party, and he said, “You know, I wasn’t making any money. I just put this thing on my site and I’m making 10,000 dollars a month. And, you know, thank you. I don’t have to do my other job now.” And I think this is really important for us, because it makes the Internet work better. It makes content get better, it makes searching work better, when people can really make their livelihood from producing great content.

“ Everyone in the world has access to our search, and I think that’s a tremendous, tremendous benefit.”

So this session is supposed to be about the future, so I’d thought I’d talk at least briefly about it. And the idea behind this is to do the perfect job doing search, you really have to be smart. Because you can type, you know, any kind of thing into Google, and you expect an answer back, right? But finding things is tricky, and so you really want intelligence. And in fact, the ultimate search engine would be smart. It would be artificial intelligence. And so that’s

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something we work on, and we even have some people who are excited enough and crazy enough to work on it now, and that’s really their goal. So we always hope that Google will be smart, but we’re always surprised when other people think that it is.

And so I just wanted to give a funny example of this. This is a blog from Iraq, and it’s not really what I’m going to talk about, but I just wanted to show you an example. Maybe, Sergey, you can highlight this. So we decided – actually, the highlight’s right there.

Oh, thank you.

So, “related searches,” right there. You can’t see it that well, but we decided we should put in this feature into our AdSense ads, called “related searches.” And so we’d say, you know, “Did you mean ‘search for’” – what is this, in this case, “Saddam Hussein,” because this blog is about Iraq – and you know, in addition to the ads, and we thought this would be a great idea.

And so there is this blog of a young person who was kind of depressed, and he said, “You know, I’m sleeping a lot.” He was just kind of writing about his life. And our algorithms – not a person, of course, but our algorithms, our computers – read his blog and decided that the related search was, “I am bored.” And he read this, and he thought a person had decided that he was boring, and it was very unfortunate, and he said, “You know, what are these, you know,

bastards at Google doing? Why don’t they like my blog?” And so then we read his blog, which was getting – you know, sort of going from bad to worse, and we said the related search was, “Retards.” And then, you know, he got even more mad, and he wrote – like, started swearing and so on. And then we produced “You suck.”

And finally, it ended with “Kiss my ass.” And so basically, he thought he was dealing with something smart, and of course, you know, we just sort of wrote this program and we tried it out, and it didn’t quite work, and we don’t have this feature anymore.

So with that, maybe I can switch back to the world. I wanted to end just by saying that there’s a couple things that really make me excited to be involved with Google, and one of those is that we’re able to make money largely through advertising, and one of the benefits that I didn’t expect from that was that we’re able to serve everyone in the world without worrying about, you know, places that don’t have as much money. So we don’t have to worry about our products being sold, for example, for less money in places that are poor, and then they get re-imported into the U.S. – for example, with the drug industry.

And I think we’re really lucky to have that kind of business model because everyone in the world has access to our search, and I think that’s a tremendous, tremendous benefit. The other

thing I wanted to mention just briefly is that we have a tremendous ability and responsibility to provide people the right information, and we view ourselves like a newspaper or a magazine – that we should provide very objective information.

And so in our search results, we never accept payment for our search results. We accept payment for advertising, and we mark it as such.

And that’s unlike many of our competitors. And I think decisions we’re able to make like that have a tremendous impact on the world, and it makes me really proud to be involved with Google. So thank you.

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“ What an amazing opportunity you gave me. I won’t waste it.”

—Majora Carter, Sustainable South Bronx

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2005

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“ A mind-opening experience.

If it opens any more, I am afraid it will float past the ozone layer.”

—Amy Tan, Author

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2006

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“ TED moments have been echoing in my brain ever since I left Monterey.

A wonderful experience.”

—Dan Dennett, Philosopher

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2007

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2007 – Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers — The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and now, his latest, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants. He has been named one of the 100 most influential people by TIME magazine and one of the Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.

He has explored how ideas spread in the Tipping Point, decision making in Blink, and the roots of success in Outliers. With his latest book, David and Goliath, he examines our understanding of the advantages of having disadvantages, arguing that we have underestimated the value of adversity and also over-estimated the value of privilege.

He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996 and has won several awards inluding the national magazine award and been honored by the American Psychological Society and the American Sociological Society. He was previously a reporter for The Washington Post.

Malcolm is an extraordinary speaker: always on target, aware of the context and the concerns of the audience, informative and practical, poised, eloquent and warm and funny.

He has an unsurpassed ability to be both entertaining and challenging.

Credentials • •

• • • •

Staff writer for The New Yorker Author, The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw and David and Goliath Member of the Order of Canada Honourary doctorate of letters, University of Toronto Former science and medicine writer for The Washington Post Winner, National Magazine Award

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2007 – Malcolm Gladwell

we can learn from spaghetti sauce by malcolm gladwell

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I think I was supposed to talk about my new book, which is called “Blink,” and it’s about snap judgments and first impressions. And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate.

But I was thinking about this, and I realized that although my new book makes me happy, and I think would make my mother happy, it’s not really about happiness. So I decided instead, I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years, a man who is a great personal hero of mine: someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce.

Howard’s about this high, and he’s round, and he’s in his 60s, and he has big huge glasses and thinning grey hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, and he has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he’s a great aficionado of medieval history. And by profession, he’s a psychophysicist. Now, I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is, although at some point in my life, I dated a girl for two years who was getting her doctorate in psychophysics. Which should tell you something about that relationship. (Laughter)

As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring things. And Howard is very interested in measuring things. And graduated with his doctorate from Harvard, and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains, New York. And one of his first clients was – this is

many years ago, back in the early ‘70s – one of his first clients was Pepsi. And Pepsi came to Howard and they said, “You know, there’s this new thing called aspartame, and we would like to make Diet Pepsi. We’d like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi, in order to have the perfect drink.” Right? Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer, and that’s what Howard thought. Because Pepsi told him, “Look, we’re working with a band between eight and 12 percent. Anything below eight percent sweetness is not sweet enough; anything above 12 percent sweetness is too sweet.

We want to know: what’s the sweet spot between eight and 12?” Now, if I gave you this problem to do, you would all say, it’s very simple. What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi, at every degree of sweetness – eight percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, all the way up to 12 – and we try this out with thousands of people, and we plot the results on a curve, and we take the most popular concentration. Right? Really simple.

Howard does the experiment, and he gets the data back, and he plots it on a curve, and all of a sudden he realizes it’s not a nice bell curve. In fact, the data doesn’t make any sense.

It’s a mess. It’s all over the place. Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such, are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess. They think, well, you know,

figuring out what people think about cola’s not that easy. You know, maybe we made an error somewhere along the way. You know, let’s just make an educated guess, and they simply point and they go for 10 percent, right in the middle.

Howard is not so easily placated. Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards.

And this was not good enough for him, and this question bedeviled him for years. And he would think it through and say, what was wrong? Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi?

And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains, about to go trying to dream up some work for Nescafe. And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him. And that is, that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data, they were asking the wrong question.

They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis. Trust me. This was an enormous revelation. This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science. And Howard immediately went on the road, and he would go to conferences around the country, and he would stand up and he would say, “You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi. You’re wrong. You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis.” And people would look at him with a blank look, and they would say, “What are you talking about? This is craziness.” And they

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would say, you know, “Move! Next!” Tried to get business, nobody would hire him – he was obsessed, though, and he talked about it and talked about it and talked about it. Howard loves the Yiddish expression “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.” This was his horseradish. (Laughter) He was obsessed with it!

And finally, he had a breakthrough.

Vlasic Pickles came to him, and they said, “Mr. Moskowitz – Doctor Moskowitz – we want to make the perfect pickle.” And he said, “There is no perfect pickle; there are only perfect pickles.”

And he came back to them and he said, “You don’t just need to improve your regular; you need to create zesty.” And that’s where we got zesty pickles. Then the next person came to him, and that was Campbell’s Soup. And this was even more important. In fact, Campbell’s Soup is where Howard made his reputation.

Campbell’s made Prego, and Prego, in the early ‘80s, was struggling next to Ragu, which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Now in the industry – I don’t know whether you care about this, or how much time I have to go into this. But it was, technically speaking – this is an aside – Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragu. The quality of the tomato paste is much better; the spice mix is far superior; it adheres to the pasta in a much more pleasing way. In fact, they would do the famous bowl

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test back in the ‘70s with Ragu and Prego. You’d have a plate of spaghetti, and you would pour it on, right? And the Ragu would all go to the bottom, and the Prego would sit on top. That’s called “adherence.” And, anyway, despite the fact that they were far superior in adherence, and the quality of their tomato paste, Prego was struggling.

So they came to Howard, and they said, fix us. And Howard looked at their product line, and he said, what you have is a dead tomato society. So he said, this is what I want to do.

And he got together with the Campbell’s soup kitchen, and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce: by sweetness, by level of garlic, by tartness, by sourness, by tomatoey-ness, by visible solids – my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business.

(Laughter) Every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce. And then he took this whole raft of 45 spaghetti sauces, and he went on the road. He went to New York; he went to Chicago; he went to Jacksonville; he went to Los Angeles. And he brought in people by the truckload. Into big halls. And he sat them down for two hours, and he gave them, over the course of that two hours, ten bowls. Ten small bowls of pasta, with a different spaghetti sauce on each one. And after they ate each bowl, they had to rate, from

0 to 100, how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was.

At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. And then he analyzed the data.

Now, did he look for the most popular brand variety of spaghetti sauce? No! Howard doesn’t believe that there is such a thing. Instead, he looked at the data, and he said, let’s see if we can group all these different data points into clusters. Let’s see if they congregate around certain ideas. And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain; there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy; and there are people who like it extra chunky.

“ Every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce.”

And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant, because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, “You telling me that one third of

Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs?” And he said yes! (Laughter) And Prego then went back, and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce, and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. And over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars off their line of extra-chunky sauces.

And everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, “Oh my god! We’ve been thinking all wrong!” And that’s when you started to get seven different kinds of vinegar, and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil – and then eventually even Ragu hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragu that he did for Prego. And today, if you go to the supermarket, a really good one, and you look at how many Ragus there are – do you know how many they are? 36! In six varieties: Cheese, Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional, Extra-Chunky Garden. (Laughter) That’s Howard’s doing. That is Howard’s gift to the American people.

Now why is that important? It is, in fact, enormously important. I’ll explain to you why.

What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy. Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find

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out what people want to eat – what will make people happy – is to ask them. And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people down, and they would say, “What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce.” And for all those years – 20, 30 years – through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky. Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did.

“ …to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to.”

People don’t know what they want! Right?

As Howard loves to say, “The mind knows not what the tongue wants.” It’s a mystery! And a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down.

If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you’d say? Every one of you would say, “I want a dark, rich, hearty roast.” It’s what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee.

What do you like? Dark, rich, hearty roast!

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What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you.

Most of you like milky, weak coffee. But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want that “I want a milky, weak coffee.” (Laughter)

So that’s number one thing that Howard did. Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize – it’s another very critical point – he made us realize in the importance of what he likes to call “horizontal segmentation.” Why is this critical? It’s critical because this is the way the food industry thought before Howard. Right? What were they obsessed with in the early ‘80s? They were obsessed with mustard. In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon. Right?

Used to be, there were two mustards. French’s and Gulden’s. What were they? Yellow mustard.

What’s in yellow mustard? Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. That was mustard. Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon. Right? Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white wine, a nose hit, much more delicate aromatics.

And what do they do? They put it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it, made it look French, even though it’s made in Oxnard, California. And instead of charging a dollar-fifty for the eight-ounce bottle, the way that French’s and Gulden’s did, they decided to

charge four dollars. And then they had those ads, right? With the guy in the Rolls Royce, and he’s eating the Grey Poupon. The other Rolls Royce pulls up, and he says, do you have any Grey Poupon? And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off! Takes over the mustard business!

And everyone’s take-home lesson from that was that the way to get to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. Right? It’s to make them turn their back on what they think they like now, and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy. A better mustard! A more expensive mustard! A mustard of more sophistication and culture and meaning. And Howard looked to that and said, that’s wrong!

Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people. He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste. And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks.

Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important, is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish. (Laughter) What do I mean by that? For the longest time in the food industry, there was a sense that there was one

way, a perfect way, to make a dish. You go to Chez Panisse, they give you the red-tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds in a something something reduction. They don’t give you five options on the reduction, right? They don’t say, do you want the extra-chunky reduction, or do you want the – no! You just get the reduction.

Why? Because the chef at Chez Panisse has a Platonic notion about red-tail sashimi. This is the way it ought to be. And she serves it that way time and time again, and if you quarrel with her, she will say, “You know what? You’re wrong! This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant.”

Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well. They had a notion, a Platonic notion, of what tomato sauce was. And where did that come from? It came from Italy. Italian tomato sauce is what? It’s blended; it’s thin. The culture of tomato sauce was thin. When we talked about authentic tomato sauce in the 1970s, we talked about Italian tomato sauce. We talked about the earliest ragus, which had no visible solids, right?

Which were thin, and you just put a little bit over it and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. That’s what it was. And why were we attached to that? Because we thought that what it took to make people happy was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce, A; and B, we thought that if we gave

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them the culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they would embrace it. And that’s what would please the maximum number of people.

“ That in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness.”

And the reason we thought that – in other words, people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. They were looking for one way to treat all of us. And it’s good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals, because all of science, through the 19th century and much of the 20th, was obsessed with universals. Psychologists, medical scientists, economists were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave. But that changed, right? What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability.

Now in medical science, we don’t want to know how necessarily – just how cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. I guess my cancer different from your cancer. Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability. What Howard

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Moskowitz was doing was saying, this same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce. And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks.

I’ll give you one last illustration of variability, and that is – oh, I’m sorry. Howard not only believed that, but he took it a second step, which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food, we aren’t just making an error; we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice. And the example he used was coffee. And coffee is something he did a lot of work with, with Nescafe. If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee – a type of coffee, a brew – that made all of you happy, and then I asked you to rate that coffee, the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, maybe three or four coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just for each of those individual clusters, your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78. The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.

That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz: that in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness.

Thank you.

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“ I wish I’d started coming earlier.”

—Richard Dawkins, Biologist

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“ Being a part of TED was a genuine privilege. I’ve never experienced anything remotely like it. I was entertained, educated, enthralled, moved, challenged, intimidated, humbled and most of all inspired!”

—Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks skg

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2009 – Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister

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Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962 in Bregenz, Austria)

is a New York-based graphic designer and typographer. He has his own design firm, Sagmeister Inc in New York City. He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith and Pat Metheny.

Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He later received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York. He began his design career at the age of 15 at “Alphorn”, an Austrian Youth magazine, which is named after the traditional Alpine musical instrument. In 1991, he moved to Hong Kong to work the Leo Burnett’s Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to work Tibor Kalman’s M&Co design firm. His tenure there was short lived, as Kalman soon decided to retire from the design business to edit Colors magazine for the Benetton Group in Rome.

He then proceeded to form the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner. Sagmeister Inc. has employed designers including Martin Woodtli, and Hjalti Karlsson and Jan Wilker, who later formed Karlssonwilker. Sagmeister is a long-standing artistic collaborator with musicians David Byrne and Lou Reed. He is the author of the

design monograph “Made You Look” which was published by Booth-Clibborn editions. Solo shows on Sagmeister Inc’s work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Japan, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, and Seoul. He teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Arts in New York and has been appointed as the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York.

He has received a Grammy Award in 2005 in Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package category for art directing Once in a Lifetime box set by Talking Heads. He would also work on the 2008 David Byrne and Brian Eno album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

His motto is “Design that needed guts from the creator and still carries the ghost of these guts in the final execution.” Sagmeister goes on a year-long sabbatical around every 7 years, where he does not take work from clients.

He has just returned from one in Bali, Indonesia, he is resolute about this, even if the work is tempting, and has displayed this by declining an offer to design a poster for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Sagmeister spends the year experimenting with personal work and refreshing himself as a designer.

www.sagmeister.com

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the power of time off by stefan sagmeister

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I run a design studio in New York. Every seven years I close it for one year to pursue some little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year. In that year we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.

I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two loves, music and design. And we created videos and packaging for many musicians that you know. And for even more that you’ve never heard of. As I realized, just like with many many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to it. And I get, over time, bored by them. And for sure, in our case, our work started to look the same. You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book. Quite the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged in a book, in a die cut. So I decided to close it down for one year. Also is the knowledge that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of our lives learning. Then there is another 40 years that’s really reserved for working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement.

And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years. (Applause) That’s clearly enjoyable for myself. But probably even more important is that the work that comes out of these years flows

back into the company, and into society at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two.

There is a fellow tedster who spoke two years ago, Jonathan Haidt, who defined his work into three different levels. And they rang very true for me. I can see my work as a job. I do it for money. I likely already look forward to the weekend, on Thursdays. And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism. In a career I’m definitely more engaged. But at the same time there will be periods when I think is all that really hard work really worth my while? While in the third one, in the calling, very much likely I would do it also if I wouldn’t be financially compensated for it.

I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. Looked for something different for the second one. Europe and the U.S. didn’t really feel enticing because I knew them too well. So Asia it was. The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali. Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on. So Bali it was. It’s a wonderful, very craft-oriented society.

I arrived there in September 2008, and pretty much started to work right away. There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself. However the first thing that I needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were definitely around heavily. And then I

needed some sort of way to be able to get back to all the wild dogs that surround my house, and attacked me during my morning walks.

So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts. Every single dog on one tee shirt. As a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly menacing message (Laughter) on the back of the shirt. (Laughter)

Just before I left New York I decided I could actually renovate my studio. And then just leave it all to them. And I don’t have to do anything. So I looked for furniture. And it turned out that all the furniture that I really liked, I couldn’t afford. And all the stuff I could afford, I didn’t like. So one of the things that we pursued in Bali was pieces of furniture. This one, of course, still works with the wild dogs. It’s not quite finished yet. And I think by the time this lamp came about, (Laughter) I had finally made piece with those dogs. (Laughter)

Then there is a coffee table. I also did a coffee table. It’s called Be Here Now. It includes 330 compasses. And we had custom espresso cups made that hide a magnet inside, and make those compasses go crazy, always centering on them. Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of chair. I also start meditating for the first time in my life in Bali. And at the same time, I’m extremely aware how boring it is to hear about other people’s happinesses. So I will not really go too far into it.

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show you a couple of people that did well by pursuing sabbaticals.

This is Ferran Adria. Many people think he is right now the best chef in the world with his restaurant north of Barcelona, elBulli. His restaurant is open seven months every year. He closes it down for five months to experiment with a full kitchen staff. His latest numbers are fairly impressive. He can seat, throughout the year, he can seat 8,000 people. And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations.

“ What came out of it? I really got close to design again. I had fun.”

If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical, it’s 12.5 percent of my time. And if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine, 3M, since the 1930s is giving all their engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever they want. There is some good successes. Scotch tape came out of this program, as well as Art Fry developed sticky notes from during his personal time for 3M. Google, of course, very famously gives 20 percent for their software engineers to pursue their own personal projects.

Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical? That’s about five percent

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of everybody. So I’m not sure if you saw your neighbour putting their hand up. Talk to them about if it was successful or not. I’ve found that finding out about what I’m going to like in the future, my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it.

When I had the idea of doing one, the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book. And then I told as many, many people as I possibly could about it so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on. (Laughter)

In the beginning, on the first sabbatical, it was rather disastrous. I had thought that I should do this without any plan, that this vacuum of time somehow would be wonderful and enticing for idea generation. It was not.

I just, without a plan, I just reacted to little requests, not work requests, those I all said no to, but other little requests. Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things like that.

So I became my own intern. (Laughter)

And I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in, put them in a hierarchy, divided them into chunks of time and then made a plan, very much like in grade school.

What does it say here? Monday eight to nine: story writing. Nine to ten: future thinking. Was not very successful. And so on and so forth. And that actually, specifically as a starting point of

the first sabbatical, worked really well for me.

What came out of it? I really got close to design again. I had fun. Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually successful. Because of the improved quality, we could ask for higher prices.

And probably most importantly, basically everything we’ve done in the seven years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking of that one single year. And I’ll show you a couple of projects that came out of the seven years following that sabbatical. One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly overrated. This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for a very very few strand of companies, and not for everybody else.

We were asked to design an identity for Casa de Musica, the Rem Koolhaas-built music center in Porto, in Portugal. And even though I desired to do an identity that doesn’t use the architecture, I failed at that. And mostly also because I realized out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of Porto where he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning. Which I understood after I translated it from architecture speech in to regular English, basically as logo making. And I understood that the building itself was a logo.

So then it became quite easy. We put a mask on it, looked at it deep down in the ground, checked it out from all sides, west,

north, south, east, top and bottom. Coloured them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine write a piece of software, the Casa de Musica Logo Generator. That’s connected to a scanner. You put any image in there, like that Beethoven image. And the software, in a second, will give you the Casa de Musica Beethoven logo. Which, when you actually have to design a Beethoven poster, comes in handy because the visual information of the logo and the actual poster, is exactly the same.

So it will always fits together, conceptually, of course. If Zappa’s music is performed, it gets its own logo. Or Philip Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical Brothers who all performed there, get their own Casa de Musica logo. It works the same internally with the president or the musical director, whose Casa de Musica portraits wind up on their business cards. There is a fullblown orchestra living inside the building. It has a more transparent identity. The truck they go on tour with. Or there’s a smaller contemporary orchestra, 12 people that remixes its own title.

“ Self confidence produces fine results.”

And one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the logo type and create advertising out of it. Like this Donna

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promote with it? There must be something else. And the whole series of work came out of it. Some of you might have seen it. I showed some of it at earlier ted’s before, under the title “Things I’ve Learned In My Life So Far”. I’ll just show two now.

This is a whole wall of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in this gallery in New York. It says, “Self confidence produces fine results.” This is after a week. After two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. And you see the self confidence almost comes back, but not quite. These are some pictures visitors sent to me. (Laughter)

And then the city of Amsterdam gave us a plaza and asked us to do something. We used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece. We got 250 thousand coins from the central bank, at different darknesses. So we got brand new ones, shiny ones, medium ones, and very old, dark ones. And with the help of 100 volunteers, over a week, created this fairly floral typography that spelled, “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better.”

And the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience you would be in between, “Should I really take as much money as I can? Or should I leave the piece intact as it is right now?” While we built all this up during that week, with the hundred volunteers, a good number of the neighbors

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surrounding the plaza got very close to it and quite loved it. So when it was finally done, and in the first night a guy came with big plastic bags and scooped up as many coins as he could possibly carry, one of the neighbors called the police.

And the Amsterdam police in all their wisdom, came, saw, and they wanted to protect the artwork. And they swept it all up and put it into custody at police headquarters. (Laughter) I think you see, you see them sweeping. You see them sweeping right here. That’s the police, getting rid of it all. So after eight hours that’s pretty much all that was left of the whole thing. (Laughter)

“ So of course whatever you don’t really do yourself doesn’t really get done properly.”

We are also working on the start of a bigger project in Bali. It’s a movie about happiness. And here we asked some nearby pigs to do the titles for us. They weren’t quite slick enough. So we asked the goose to do it again, and hoped she would do somehow, a more elegant or pretty job. And I think she overdid it.

Just a bit too ornamental. And my studio is very close to the monkey forest. And the monkeys in that monkey forest looked, actually, fairly happy.

So we asked those guys to do it again. They did a fine job, but had a couple of readability problems. So of course whatever you don’t really do yourself doesn’t really get done properly.

That film we’ll be working on for the next two years. So It’s going to be a while. And of course you might think that doing a film on happiness might not really be worthwhile, then you can of course always go and see this guy.

Video: (Laughter) And I’m happy I’m alive. I’m happy I’m alive. I’m happy I’m alive.

Stefan Sagmeister: Thank you. (Applause)

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“ TED was simply wonderful, an intellectual spa, a 21st-century Chataqua, superb and singular.”

—Kurt Andersen, co-chair, Powerful Media

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“ It was INCREDIBLE. I had a wonderful time and met a thousand fascinating people.”

—Malcolm Gladwell, Author

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2011 – Pamela Meyer

Pamela Meyer

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Social media expert Pamela Meyer can tell when you’re lying. If it’s not your words that give you away, it’s your posture, eyes, breathing rate, fidgets, and a host of other indicators. Worse, we are all lied to up to 200 times a day, she says, from the white lies that allow society to function smoothly to the devastating duplicities that bring down corporations and break up families.

Working with a team of researchers over several years, Meyer, who is CEO of social networking company Simpatico Networks, collected and reviewed most of the research on deception that has been published, from such fields as law-enforcement, military, psychology and espionage. She then became an expert herself, receiving advanced training in deception detection, including multiple courses of advanced training in interrogation, microexpression analysis, statement analysis, behavior and body language interpretation, and emotion recognition. Her research is synthetized in her bestselling book Liespotting.

Ms. Meyer’s work and her BASIC method for detecting deception has been featured in BusinessWeek, The New York Post, The Washington Post, Forbes, Huffington post, ABC News, Portfolio, Fox Radio, Cosmopolitan, and several syndicated radio and television programs.

“A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance; its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.”

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how to spot a liar by pamela meyer

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Okay, now I don’t want to alarm anybody in this room, but it’s just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar. (Laughter) Also, the person to your left is a liar. Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar. We’re all liars. What I’m going to do today is I’m going to show you what the research says about why we’re all liars, how you can become a liespotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from liespotting to truth seeking, and ultimately to trust building.

Now speaking of trust, ever since I wrote this book, “Liespotting,” no one wants to meet me in person anymore, no, no, no, no, no.

They say, “It’s okay, we’ll email you.” (Laughter) I can’t even get a coffee date at Starbucks. My husband’s like, “Honey, deception? Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking?”

So before I get started, what I’m going to do is I’m going to clarify my goal for you, which is not to teach a game of Gotcha. Liespotters aren’t those nitpicky kids, those kids in the back of the room that are shouting, “Gotcha! Gotcha!

Your eyebrow twitched. You flared your nostril.

I watch that TV show ‘Lie To Me.’ I know you’re lying.” No, liespotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception.

They use it to get to the truth, and they do what mature leaders do everyday; they have difficult conversations with difficult people, sometimes during very difficult times. And they start up

that path by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.

So I know it may sound like tough love, but look, if at some point you got lied to, it’s because you agreed to get lied to. Truth number one about lying: Lying’s a cooperative act. Now not all lies are harmful. Sometimes we’re willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret. We say, “Nice song.” “Honey, you don’t look fat in that, no.” Or we say, favorite of the digiratti, “You know, I just fished that email out of my spam folder. So sorry.”

But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception. And that can have dramatic costs for us. Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States. That’s an eyelash under a trillion dollars.

That’s seven percent of revenues. Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country, they can compromise our security, they can undermine democracy, they can cause the deaths of those that defend us.

Deception is actually serious business. This con man, Henry Oberlander, he was such an effective con man British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world. And you can’t find this guy on Google; you can’t find him anywhere. He was interviewed once, and he said the following. He said, “Look, I’ve got one rule.”

“ They’re ready to give you something for whatever it is they’re hungry for.”

And this was Henry’s rule, he said, “Look, everyone is willing to give you something.

They’re ready to give you something for whatever it is they’re hungry for.” And that’s the crux of it. If you don’t want to be deceived, you have to know, what is it that you’re hungry for?

And we all kind of hate to admit it. We wish we were better husbands, better wives, smarter, more powerful, taller, richer – the list goes on.

Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap, to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be, with what we’re really like. And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies.

On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times. Now granted, many of those are white lies. But in

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another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other. (Laughter) Now when we first hear this data, we recoil. We can’t believe how prevalent lying is. We’re essentially against lying.

But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens. We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers. Extroverts lie more than introverts.

Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people. If you’re an average married couple, you’re going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. Now you may think that’s bad. It you’re unmarried, that number drops to three.

“ No mortal can keep a secret.

If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips.”

Lying’s complex. It’s woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. We’re deeply ambivalent about the truth. We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very good reasons, other times just because we don’t understand the gaps in our lives. That’s truth number two about lying. We’re against lying, but we’re covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. It’s as old as breathing. It’s part of our

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culture, it’s part of our history. Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World.

Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species. Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species, the larger the neocortex, the more likely it is to be deceptive.

Now you might remember Koko. Does anybody remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language? Koko was taught to communicate via sign language. Here’s Koko with her kitten.

It’s her cute little, fluffy pet kitten. Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall. (Laughter) We’re hardwired to become leaders of the pack. It’s starts really, really early.

How early? Well babies will fake a cry, pause, wait to see who’s coming and then go right back to crying. One-year-olds learn concealment.

(Laughter) Two-year-olds bluff. Five-year-olds lie outright. They manipulate via flattery.

Nine-year-olds, masters of the cover up. By the time you enter college, you’re going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions.

By the time we enter this work world and we’re breadwinners, we enter a world that is just cluttered with spam, fake digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers, a deception epidemic – in short, what one author calls a post-truth society. It’s been very confusing for a long time now.

What do you do? Well there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass.

Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time. The rest of us, we’re only 54 percent accurate. Why is it so easy to learn? There are good liars and there are bad liars. There are no real original liars. We all make the same mistakes. We all use the same techniques. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you two patterns of deception. And then we’re going to look at the hot spots and see if we can find them ourselves. We’re going to start with speech.

(Video) Bill Clinton: I want you to listen to me.

I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. And these allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people.

Thank you.

Pamela Meyer: Okay, what were the telltale signs? Well first we heard what’s known as a non-contracted denial. Studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language.

We also heard distancing language: “that woman.” We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject using language as their tool. Now if Bill Clinton had

said, “Well, to tell you the truth… “ or Richard Nixon’s favorite, “In all candor… “ he would have been a dead giveaway for any liespotter than knows that qualifying language, as it’s called, qualifying language like that, further discredits the subject. Now if he had repeated the question in its entirety, or if he had peppered his account with a little too much detail – and we’re all really glad he didn’t do that – he would have further discredited himself. Freud had it right. Freud said, look, there’s much more to it than speech: “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips.”

And we all do it no matter how powerful you are. We all chatter with our fingertips. I’m going to show you Dominique Strauss-Kahn with Obama who’s chattering with his fingertips.

Now this brings us to our next pattern, which is body language. With body language, here’s what you’ve got to do. You’ve really got to just throw your assumptions out the door. Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit.

Because we think liars fidget all the time. Well guess what, they’re known to freeze their upper bodies when they’re lying. We think liars won’t look you in the eyes. Well guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth. We think warmth and smiles convey honesty, sincerity. But a trained liespotter can spot a fake smile a mile away. Can you all spot the fake smile here? You

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can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks. But the real smile’s in the eyes, the crow’s feet of the eyes. They cannot be consciously contracted, especially if you overdid the Botox.

Don’t overdo the Botox; nobody will think you’re honest.

Now we’re going to look at the hot spots.

Can you tell what’s happening in a conversation? Can you start to find the hot spots to see the discrepancies between someone’s words and someone’s actions? Now I know it seems really obvious, but when you’re having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators.

“ Murderers are known to leak sadness.”

An honest person is going to be cooperative. They’re going to show they’re on your side. They’re going to be enthusiastic.

They’re going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth. They’re going to be willing to brainstorm, name suspects, provide details. They’re going to say, “Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks.”

They’re going to be infuriated if they sense they’re wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview, not just in flashes; they’ll

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be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview. And if you ask someone honest what should happen to whomever did forge those checks, an honest person is much more likely to recommend strict rather than lenient punishment.

Now let’s say you’re having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive. That person may be withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, be kind of herky-jerky. Ask a deceptive person to tell their story, they’re going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places. And then they’re going to tell their story in strict chronological order. And what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways over the course of several hours, they will ask that person to tell that story backwards, and then they’ll watch them squirm, and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells.

Why do they do that? Well we all do the same thing. We rehearse our words, but we rarely rehearse our gestures. We say “yes,” we shake our heads “no.” We tell very convincing stories, we slightly shrug our shoulders. We commit terrible crimes, and we smile at the delight in getting away with it. Now that smile is known in the trade as “duping delight.”

And we’re going to see that in several videos moving forward, but we’re going to start – for those of you who don’t know him,

this is presidential candidate John Edwards who shocked America by fathering a child out of wedlock. We’re going to see him talk about getting a paternity test. See now if you can spot him saying, “yes” while shaking his head “no,” slightly shrugging his shoulders.

(Video) John Edwards: I’d be happy to participate in one. I know that it’s not possible that this child could be mine, because of the timing of events. So I know it’s not possible.

Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen. Interviewer: Are you going to do that soon? Is there somebody – JE: Well, I’m only one side. I’m only one side of the test. But I’m happy to participate in one.

PM: Okay, those head shakes are much easier to spot once you know to look for them. There’re going to be times when someone makes one expression while masking another that just kind of leaks through in a flash. Murderers are known to leak sadness. Your new joint venture partner might shake your hand, celebrate, go out to dinner with you and then leak an expression of anger. And we’re not all going to become facial expression experts overnight here, but there’s one I can teach you that’s very dangerous, and it’s easy to learn, and that’s the expression of contempt. Now with anger, you’ve got two people on an even playing field. It’s still

somewhat of a healthy relationship. But when anger turns to contempt, you’ve been dismissed.

It’s associated with moral superiority. And for that reason, it’s very, very hard to recover from.

Here’s what it looks like. It’s marked by one lip corner pulled up and in. It’s the only asymmetrical expression. And in the presence of contempt, whether or not deception follows – and it doesn’t always follow – look the other way, go the other direction, reconsider the deal, say, “No thank you. I’m not coming up for just one more nightcap. Thank you.”

Science has surfaced many, many more indicators. We know, for example, we know liars will shift their blink rate, point their feet towards an exit. They will take barrier objects and put them between themselves and the person that is interviewing them. They’ll alter their vocal tone, often making their vocal tone much lower. Now here’s the deal. These behaviors are just behaviors. They’re not proof of deception. They’re red flags. We’re human beings. We make deceptive flailing gestures all over the place all day long. They don’t mean anything in and of themselves. But when you see clusters of them, that’s your signal. Look, listen, probe, ask some hard questions, get out of that very comfortable mode of knowing, walk into curiosity mode, ask more questions, have a little dignity, treat the person you’re talking to

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with rapport. Don’t try to be like those folks on “Law & Order” and those other TV shows that pummel their subjects into submission. Don’t be too aggressive, it doesn’t work.

Now we’ve talked a little bit about how to talk to someone who’s lying and how to spot a lie. And as I promised, we’re now going to look at what the truth looks like. But I’m going to show you two videos, two mothers – one is lying, one is telling the truth. And these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California. And I think they’re an excellent example of what the truth looks like.

This mother, Diane Downs, shot her kids at close range, drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car, claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it. And you’ll see when you see the video, she can’t even pretend to be an agonizing mother. What you want to look for here is an incredible discrepancy between horrific events that she describes and her very, very cool demeanor. And if you look closely, you’ll see duping delight throughout this video.

(Video) Diane Downs: At night when I close my eyes, I can see Christie reaching her hand out to me while I’m driving, and the blood just kept coming out of her mouth. And that – maybe it’ll fade too with time – but I don’t think so. That bothers me the most.

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PM: Now I’m going to show you a video of an actual grieving mother, Erin Runnion, confronting her daughter’s murderer and torturer in court. Here you’re going to see no false emotion, just the authentic expression of a mother’s agony.

(Video) Erin Runnion: I wrote this statement on the third anniversary of the night you took my baby, and you hurt her, and you crushed her, you terrified her until her heart stopped.

And she fought, and I know she fought you. But I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes, and you still wanted to kill her. And I don’t understand it, and I never will.

PM: Okay, there’s no doubting the veracity of those emotions.

Now the technology around what the truth looks like is progressing on, the science of it. We know for example that we now have specialized eye trackers and infrared brain scans, MRI’s that can decode the signals that our bodies send out when we’re trying to be deceptive. And these technologies are going to be marketed to all of us as panaceas for deceit, and they will prove incredibly useful some day. But you’ve got to ask yourself in the meantime: Who do you want on your side of the meeting, someone who’s trained in getting to the truth or some guy who’s going

to drag a 400-pound electroencephalogram through the door?

Liespotters rely on human tools. They know, as someone once said, “Character’s who you are in the dark.” And what’s kind of interesting is that today we have so little darkness. Our world is lit up 24 hours a day.

It’s transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public. It’s a much more noisy world. So one challenge we have is to remember, oversharing, that’s not honesty. Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency – character integrity – that’s still what matters, that’s always what’s going to matter. So in this much noisier world, it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code.

When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, “Hey, my world, our world, it’s going to be an honest one. My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized.” And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit.

And that’s the truth. Thank you.

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“ Truly an amazing experience.”

—Joshua Prince-Ramus, Architect

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“ TED is all about patterns in the clouds. It’s all about connections. It’s all about seeing things that everybody else has seen before but thinking about them in ways that nobody has thought of them before.” —Jay Walker, Entrepreneur

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Index

Index

Abrams, J. J. p.363–370 Abreu, José Antonio p.723–730 Adichie, Chimamanda p.691–698 Alemseged, Zeresenay p.302–311 Anderson, Chris p.895–902 Armstrong, Karen p.429–438 Baraniuk, Richard p.272–281 Blaine, David p.627–634 Balog, James p.699–706 Blakley, Johanna p.751–760 Botton, Alain de p.597–606 Bono p.915–922 Branson, Richard p.272–281 Burtynsky, Edward p.683–690 Buettner, Dan p.642–650 Carson, David p.40–49 Clinton, Bill p.282–291 Carpenter, Cameron p.867–876 Christian, David p.831–838 Cowley, Steven p.675–682 Christakis, Nicholas p.761–770 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly p.70–79 deCharms, Christopher p.409–418 Dawkins, Richard p.100–109 Deutsch, David p.617–626 Dolhun, Eduardo p.905–914 de Grey, Aubrey p.110–117 Ensler, Eve p.126–135 Eggers, Dave p.459–466

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Fallon, Jim p.607–616 Fischell, Robert p.118–125 Gabriel, Peter p.236–245 Gates, Bill p.659–666 Gehry, Frank p.20–27 Gladwell, Malcolm p.292–301 Godin, Seth p.811–818 Gore, Al p.667–674 Grandin, Temple p.779–786 Greene, Brian p.857–866 Haidt, Jonathan p.887–894 Hancock, Herbie p.715–722 Hawking, Stephen p.399–408 Ingels, Bjarke p.847–854 Jackson, Tim p.741–750 Jordan, Chris p.491–498 Kamkwamba, William p.371–378 Kunstler, James Howard p.80–87 Khan, Salman p.839–846 Lessig, Larry p.803–810 Lisi, Antony Garrett p.419–428 Lehanneur, Mathieu p.559–568 Lomborg, Bjørn p.156–165 Lovegrove, Ross p.183–190 Lovins, Amory p.166–175

Maeda, John p.499–506 Marsh, Nigel p.787–794 McDonough, William p.190–197 Meyer, Pamela p.821–830 Mistry, Pranav p.607–616 Muniz, Vik p.50–57

Shirky, Clay p.733–740 Sinclair, Cameron p.262–269 Smoot, George p.483–490 Starck, Philippe p.356–362 Stolze, Jim p.519–528 Smith, Anna Deavere p.136–145

Nachtwey, James 379–386 Novogratz, Jacqueline p.175–182 Negroponte, Nicholas p.220–227 Noujaim, Jehane p.228–235

Tarter, Jill p.529–538 Turok, Neil p.439–448

Oliver, Jamie p.795–802 Okonjo–Iweala, Ngozi p.332–339

van Engelsdorp, Dennis p.449–458 Van Dam, Stephan p.28–37 Vasudev, Sadhguru Jaggi p.587–596

Petranek, Stephen p.10–19 Piccard, Bertrand p.651–658 Pinker, Steven p.322–331 Pink, Daniel H. p.569–578 Page, Larry p.60–69 Plan B p.877–886 Prince–Ramus, Joshua p.635–642 Quadir, Iqbal p.90–99 Rees, Sir Martin p.146–155 Robbins, Tony p.200–209

Ulbrich, Ed p.707–714

Walker, John Q. p.348–355 Warren, Rick p.210–219 Whitaker, Romulus p.539–548 Wong, Curtis p.389–398 Ynnerman, Anders p.779–786 Zander, Benjamin p.475–482 Zittrain, Jonathan p.509–518

Sacchi, Franco p.340–347 Sautoy, Marcus du p.549–558 Sagmeister. Stefan p.579–586 Scher, Paula p.467–474 Scranton, Deborah p.312–321

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