J. J. Abrams. JosÊ Antonio Abreu. Chimamanda Adichie. Zeresenay Alemseged. Chris Anderson. Karen Armstrong. Richard Baraniuk. David Blaine. James Balog. Johanna Blakley. Richard Branson. Alain e Botton. Bono. Richard Branson. Edward Burtynsky . Dan Buettner. vid Carson. Bill Clinton. Cameron Carpenter. David Christian. Steven Cowley. Nicholas Christakis. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Christopher Charms. Richard Dawkins. David Deutsch. Eduardo Dolhun | Aubrey e Grey. Eve Ensler . Dave Eggers. Jim Fallon. Robert Fischell. Peter Gabriel. Bill Gates. Frank Gehry. Malcolm Gladwell. Seth Godin. Al e. Temple Grandin. Brian Greene. Jonathan Haidt. Herbie Hancock. The Next Stephen Hawking. Bjarke Ingels. TimChapter Jackson. Chris Jordan | William Kamkwamba | James Howard Kunstler. Salman Khan. Larry Lessig. y Garrett Lisi. Mathieu Lehanneur. Bjørn Lomborg. Ross Lovegrove. ory Lovins | John Maeda. Nigel Marsh. William McDonough. Pamela . Pranav Mistry. Vik Muniz. James Nachtwey. Jacqueline Novogratz. Nicholas Negroponte. Jehane Noujaim. Jamie Oliver. Ngozi Okonjoeala. Stephen Petranek. Bertrand Piccard. Steven Pinker. Daniel H. k. Larry Page. Plan B.Joshua Prince-Ramus. Iqbal Quadir. Sir Martin ees. Tony Robbins. Franco Sacchi. Marcus du Sautoy. Paula Scher. Deborah Scranton. Clay Shirky. Cameron Sinclair. George Smoot. lippe Starck. Jim Stolze. Anna Deavere Smith. Jill Tarter. Neil Turok. lbrich. Dennis van Engelsdorp. Stephan Van Dam. Sadhguru Jaggi udev.John Q. Walker | Rick Warren. Romulus Whitaker. Curtis Wong. nders Ynnerman. Benjamin Zander. Jonathan Zittrain. J. J. Abrams. Antonio Abreu. Chimamanda Adichie. Zeresenay.Alemseged. Chris nderson. Karen Armstrong. Richard Baraniuk. David Blaine. James alog. Johanna Blakley. Richard Branson, David Carson. Bill Clinton.
TED 2014
www.ted.com
TED 1984
30th Anniversary 2014
Vancover, Canada
19841 20142
41984 42014
“It was INCREDIBLE. I had a wonderful time and met a thousand fascinating people”. Malcolm Gladwell (author)
“I wish I'd started coming earlier�. Richard Dawkins (biologist)
http://www.ted.com TED Conferences LLC 250 Hudson St. Suite 1002 New York, NY 10013 212.346.9333 Tel. 212.227.6397 Fax. Designed by Joanne Hopley
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 TEDTalks 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.
One Hundred
“At each TED conference something important happens to me: a new business, a new friend. I return exhilarated�. Nicholas Negroponte
(Director emeritus & co-founder, MIT Media Lab)
7 15 23 31 39 47 55 63 71 79 87 95 103 111 119 127 135 143 151 159 167 175 183 191
Art & Design
J. J. Abrams : The mystery box Edward Burtynsky : Photographing the landscape of oil David Carson : Design and discovery Cameron Carpenter : Transforming energy into music Frank Gehry : A master architect asks, Now what? Seth Godin : This is broken Herbie Hancock : An all-star set Chris Jordan : Turning powerful stats into art William Kamkwamba : How I built a windmill Ross Lovegrove : Organic design, inspired by nature John Maeda : My journey in design William McDonough : Cradle to cradle design Vik Muniz : Art with wire, sugar, chocolate and string James Nachtwey : Let my photographs bear witness Jehane Noujaim : A global day of film Joshua Prince-Ramus : Building a theater that remakes itself Franco Sacchi : A tour of Nollywood Stefan Sagmeister : The power of time off Paula Scher : Great design is serious, not solemn Cameron Sinclair : A call for open-source architecture Philippe Starck : Design and destiny Anna Deavere Smith : Four American characters Ed Ulbrich : How Benjamin Button got his face John Q. Walker : Great piano performances, recreated
Business & Economics
199 Richard Branson : Life at 30,000 feet 207 Tim Jackson : An economic reality check 215 Jill Tarter : A new way to fund space exploration
223 231 239 247 255 263
271 279 287 295 303 311 319 327 335
343 351 359 367 375 383 391 399
Education
JosÊ Antonio Abreu : Kids transformed by music Richard Baraniuk : Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning Dave Eggers : Once upon a school Salman Khan : Let’s use video to reinvent education Jamie Oliver : Teach every child about food Plan B : Youth, music and London
Health & Personal Growth David Blaine : How I held my breath for 17 min. Dan Buettner : How to live to be 100+ Christopher deCharms : A look inside the brain in real time Eduardo Dolhun : The importance of oral rehydration solutions Aubrey de Grey : A roadmap to end aging Nigel Marsh : How to make work-life balance work Tony Robbins : Why we do what we do Anders Ynnerman : Visualizing the medical data explosion Jonathan Zittrain : The Web as random acts of kindness
Psychology
Jim Fallon : Exploring the mind of a killer Malcolm Gladwell : We Can Learn From Spaghetti Sauce Temple Grandin : The world needs all kinds of minds Pamela Meyer : How to spot a liar Steven Pinker : The surprising decline in violence Daniel H. Pink : The puzzle of motivation Jim Stolze : Can you live without the Internet Benjamin Zander : The transformative power of classical music
407 415 423 431 449
457 465 473 481 489 497 505 513 521 529 537 545 553 561 569 577 585 593 601 609 617 625 533 541 549
Religion & Philosophy Karen Armstrong : The charter for compassion Alain de Botton : A kinder, gentler philosophy of success Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi : Flow, the secret to happiness Jonathan Haidt : Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence Rick Warren : A life of purpose
Science & Technology Zeresenay Alemseged : humanity’s roots Chris Anderson : Why can’t we see evidence of alien life? James Balog : Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss Steven Cowley : Fusion is energy’s future Richard Dawkins : Why the universe seems so strange David Deutsch : A new way to explain explanation Robert Fischell : Three unusual medical inventions Brian Greene : Is our universe the only universe? Stephen Hawking : Questioning the universe Bjarke Ingels : Hedonistic sustainability Garrett Lisi : A theory of everything Mathieu Lehanneur : Science-inspired design Amory Lovins : Winning the oil endgame Pranav Mistry : Meet the SixthSense interaction Stephen Petranek : 10 ways the world could end Bertrand Piccard : My solar-powered adventure Larry Page : The genesis of Google Iqbal Quadir : How mobile phones can fight poverty Sir Martin Rees : Is this our final century? Marcus du Sautoy : Symmetry, reality’s riddle Clay Shirky : How cognitive surplus will change the world George Smoot : The design of the universe Stephan Van Dam : Talks maps Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev : Wonder. Wonders. Curtis Wong : A preview of the WorldWide Telescope
557 565 573 581 589 597 605 613 621 629 637 645 653 661 669 675 683 691 699 705
Social Sciences & Global Issues Chimamanda Adichie : The danger of a single story Johanna Blakley : Social media and the end of gender Bono : The good news on poverty (Yes, there’s good news) Bill Clinton : My wish, rebuilding Rwanda David Christian : The history of our world in 18 minutes Nicholas Christakis : How social networks predict epidemics Eve Ensler : What security means to me Peter Gabriel : Fight injustice with raw video Bill Gates : Mosquitos, malaria and education Al Gore : What comes after An Inconvenient Truth? James Howard Kunstler : The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs Larry Lessig : Re-examining the remix Bjørn Lomborg : Global priorities bigger than climate change Jacqueline Novogratz : Invest in Africa’s own solutions Nicholas Negroponte : One Laptop per Child Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala : Aid versus trade Deborah Scranton : An Iraq war movie crowd-sourced from soldiers Neil Turok : Find the next Einstein in Africa Dennis van Engelsdorp : A plea for bees Romulus Whitaker : The real danger lurking in the water Social
“What an amazing opportunity you gave me. I won’t waste it”. Majora Carter
(Executive director, Sustainable South Bronx)
Art & Des
& sign Art & Design
Stefan Sagmeister 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.
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.
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 www.sagmeister.com 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 BoothClibborn editions.
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The power of time off 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.
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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. Many of you will know this TEDster, Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually I got it through the TED book club. I think it took me four years to finally read it, while on sabbatical. And I was pleased to see that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical. And I’ll 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
Art & Design // Page 146
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. 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.
“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”. Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical? That’s about five percent of everybody. So I’m not sure if you saw your neighbor 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 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”.
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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. Colored 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 full-blown 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. 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 Toney poster, or Chopin, or Mozart, or La Monte Young. You can take the shape and make typography out of it. You can grow it underneath the skin. You can have a poster for a family event in front of the house, or a rave underneath the house, or a weekly program as well as educational services.
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Second insight. So far, until that point I had been mostly involved or used the language of design for promotional purposes, which was fine with me. On one hand I have nothing against selling. My parents are both sales people. But I did feel that I spent so much time learning this language, why do I only 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 TEDs 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)
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 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)
And the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience you would be in
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.
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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.
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.”
“Truly an amazing experience.” Joshua Prince-Ramus (Architect)
Psych
hology Psychology
Malcolm Gladwell Malcolm Gladwell searches for the counterintuitive in what we all take to be the mundane: cookies, sneakers, pasta sauce. A New Yorker staff writer since 1996, he visits obscure laboratories and infomercial set kitchens as often as the hangouts of freelance cool-hunters - a sort of pop-R&D gumshoe and for that has become a star lecturer and bestselling author. Sparkling with curiosity, undaunted by difficult research (yet an eloquent, accessible writer), his work uncovers truths hidden in strange data. His always-delightful blog tackles topics from serial killers to steroids in sports, while provocative recent work in the New Yorker sheds new light on the Flynn effect the decades-spanning rise in I.Q. scores. Gladwell has written four books. The Tipping Point, which began as a New Yorker piece, applies the principles of epidemiology to crime (and sneaker sales), while Blink examines the unconscious processes that allow the mind to “thin slice” reality -- and make decisions in the blink of an eye. His third book, Outliers, questions the inevitabilities of success and identifies the relation of success to nature versus nurture. The newest work, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures, is an anthology of his New Yorker contributions. He says: “There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.”
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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 disadvantages, arguing that we have underestimated the value of adversity and overestimated the value of privilege. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has won a 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
We Can Learn From 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 he 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
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-- 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?
Spaghetti Sauce 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 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
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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 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
“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”.
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. 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 extrachunky 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, ExtraChunky 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 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
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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. (Laughter) 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! 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!
“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”.
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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 them the culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they would embrace it. And that’s what would please the maximum number of people. 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
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the door to the study of human variability. What Howard 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. ©2004 TED
“I came to the TED conference with the idea that I wanted to serve a really unique audience in an impactful way; but honestly I gained more than I could ever imagine personally from my attendance. I met so many people ... just phenomenal human beings who had a true social or contribution focus. I developed a lot of friends out of the group and learned an enormous amount�. Tony Robbins (Motivator)