TED2014: One Hundred

Richard Baraniuk David Blaine James Balog Johanna Blakley Alain de Botton Bono Richard Branson Edward Burtynsky

TED2014

Dan Buettner David Carson Stephen Hawking

ONE HUNDRED

Bill Clinton Clay Shirky Cameron Sinclair George Smoot Philippe Starck Jim Stolze Anna Deavere Smith Jill Tarter Neil Turok Ed Ulbrich Dennis van Engelsdorp Stephan Van Dam Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev John Q. Walker Rick Warren Romulus Whitaker Curtis Wong Anders Ynnerman Bjarke Ingels Tim Jackson Chris Jordan William Kamkwamba James Howard Kunstler Salman Khan Larry Lessig Antony Garrett Lisi Mathieu Lehanneur Bjørn Lomborg Ross Lovegrove Amory Lovins John Maeda Nigel Marsh

Richard Baraniuk David Blaine James Balog Johanna Blakley Alain de Botton Bono Richard Branson Edward Burtynsky Dan Buettner David Carson Stephen Hawking Bill Clinton Clay Shirky Cameron Sinclair George Smoot Philippe Starck Jim Stolze Anna Deavere Smith Jill Tarter Neil Turok Ed Ulbrich Dennis van Engelsdorp Stephan Van Dam Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev John Q. Walker Rick Warren Romulus Whitaker Curtis Wong Anders Ynnerman Bjarke Ingels Tim Jackson Chris Jordan William Kamkwamba James Howard Kunstler Salman Khan Larry Lessig Antony Garrett Lisi Mathieu Lehanneur Bjørn Lomborg Ross Lovegrove Amory Lovins John Maeda Nigel Marsh

Pamela Meyer Pranav Mistry Vik Muniz James Nachtwey J. J. Abrams JosĂŠ Antonio Abreu Chimamanda Adichie Zeresenay Alemseged Cameron Carpenter David Christian Richard Dawkins Steven Cowley Nicholas Christakis Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Paula Scher Deborah Scranton Chris Anderson Karen Armstrong Benjamin Zander Jonathan Zittrain Stefan Sagmeister Christopher deCharms Bill Gates David Deutsch Eduardo Dolhun Aubrey de Grey Eve Ensler Dave Eggers Jim Fallon Robert Fischell Peter Gabriel Frank Gehry Malcolm Gladwell Seth Godin Al Gore Temple Grandin Brian Greene Jonathan Haidt Herbie Hancock Jacqueline Novogratz Nicholas Negroponte Jehane Noujaim Jamie Oliver

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TED2014

ONE HUNDRED

TED2014

ONE HUNDRED IMG: WWW.TEDGLOBAL.BLOG.LEMONDE.FR/FILES/2012/06/TEDGLOBAL-THEATRE-EDINBURGH.JPG

The 2014 conference in Vancouver celebrates ted’s 30th anniversary, bringing together one hundred of the best speakers, some of whom will give the talks of their lives.

The following pages celebrate our very best thinkers with one hundred original ted transcripts, along with biographies and original photography.

CONTENTS BUSINESS & ECONOMICS

RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY

PSYCHOLOGY

7

65

121 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Seth Godin This is broken

18

Tim Jackson

73

An economic reality check 26

34

philosophy of success 85

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Larry Page The genesis of Google

56

Iqbal Quadir How mobile phones can fight poverty

94

Flow, the secret to happiness 133 Jim Fallon Exploring the mind of a killer 139 Malcolm Gladwell

Richard Dawkins

Choice, happiness and

Why the universe

spaghetti sauce

seems so strange

Aid versus trade 45

Alain de Botton A kinder, gentler

Amory Lovins Winning the oil endgame

Karen Armstrong The charter for compassion

151 Temple Grandin

Jonathan Haidt

The world needs all

Religion, evolution, and the

kinds of minds

ecstasy of self-transcendence 104 Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev Wonder. Wonders.

112 Rick Warren A life of purpose

161 Pamela Meyer How to spot a liar 169 Daniel H. Pink The puzzle of motivation 177 Steven Pinker The surprising decline in violence 186 Jim Stolze Can you live without the internet?

ART & DESIGN

193 J. J. Abrams The mystery box 202 Cameron Carpenter

261 Mathieu Lehanneur Science-inspired design 273 Ross Lovegrove

324 Stefan Sagmeister The power of time off 330 Paula Scher

Transforming energy

Organic design,

Great design is serious,

into music

inspired by nature

not solemn

211 David Carson Design and discovery 219 Stephan Van Dam Talks maps 226 Frank Gehry

279 John Maeda My journey in design 286 William McDonough Cradle to cradle design 293 Vik Muniz

A master architect

Art with wire, sugar,

asks, now what?

chocolate and string

237 Herbie Hancock An all-star set 244 Bjarke Ingels Hedonistic sustainability 253 Chris Jordan Turning powerful stats into art

301 James Nachtwey

338 Cameron Sinclair A call for open-source architecture 347 Anna Deavere Smith Four American characters 359 Philippe Starck Design and destiny 365 Ed Ulbrich

Let my photographs

How Benjamin Button

bear witness

got his face

312 Joshua Prince-Ramus

373 Benjamin Zander

Building a theatre

The transformative

that remakes itself

power of classical music

317 Franco Sacchi A tour of Nollywood

EDUCATION

PERSONAL GROWTH

SOCIAL SCIENCES & GLOBAL ISSUES

382 Richard Baraniuk

413 David Blaine

449 José Antonio Abreu

The birth of open-

How I held my breath

source learning

for 17 minutes

390 Dave Eggers Once upon a school 398 Salman Khan Let’s use video to reinvent education 407 Neil Turok Find the next Einstein in Africa

419 Richard Branson Life at 30,000 feet 426 Dan Buettner How to live to be 100+ 432 Nigel Marsh

Kids transformed by music 454 Chimamanda Adichie The danger of a single story 463 James Balog Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss 471 Johanna Blakley

How to make work-life

Social media and

balance work

the end of gender

441 Tony Robbins Why we do what we do

483 Bono The good news on poverty (yes, there’s good news) 490 Edward Burtynsky Photographing the landscape of oil 497 Nicholas Christakis How social networks predict epidemics

504 Bill Clinton Rebuilding rwanda 513 Eduardo Dolhun

567 Larry Lessig Re-examining the remix 586 Bjørn Lomborg

The importance of

Global priorities bigger

oral rehydration solutions

than climate change

519 Dennis vanEngelsdorp A plea for bees 526 Eve Ensler What security means to me 534 Peter Gabriel Fight injustice with raw video 541 Bill Gates Mosquitos, malaria and education 550 Al Gore What comes after An Inconvenient Truth?

559 James Howard Kunstler The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs

594 Nicholas Negroponte One laptop per child 602 Jehane Noujaim A global day of film 610 Jacqueline Novogratz Invest in Africa’s own solutions 619 Jamie Oliver Teach every child about food 626 Stephen Petranek 10 ways the world could end 634 Plan B Youth, music and London

641 Deborah Scranton An Iraq war movie crowd-sourced from soldiers 650 Clay Shirky How cognitive surplus will change the world 658 Jonathan Zittrain The web as random acts of kindness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 667 Zeresenay Alemseged Humanity’s roots

685 Chris Anderson Why can’t we see evidence of alien life?

694 David Christian The history of our world in 18 minutes

703 Steven Cowley Fusion is energy’s future

710 Christopher deCharms A look inside the brain in real time

718 David Deutsch A new way to explain explanation

725 Robert Fischell Three unusual medical inventions

733 Brian Greene Is our universe the only universe?

741 Aubrey de Grey A roadmap to end ageing 750 Stephen Hawking Questioning the universe 761 William Kamkwamba How I built a windmill 770 Antony Garrett Lisi A theory of everything 779 Pranav Mistry Meet the SixthSense interaction 787 Bertrand Piccard My solar-powered adventure 795 Sir Martin Rees Is this our final century?

803 Marcus du Sautoy Symmetry, reality’s riddle 811 George Smoot The design of the universe 818 Jill Tarter A new way to fund space exploration 826 John Q. Walker Great piano performances, recreated 833 Romulus Whitaker The real danger lurking in the water 840 Curtis Wong A preview of the Worldwide Telescope 851 Anders Ynnerman Visualizing the medical data explosion

SPEAKERS

RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY

ALAIN DE BOTTON WRITER � PHILOSOPHER � PRESENTER � ENTREPRENEUR

Alain de Botton (born 1969) is a Swiss/British writer, philosopher, television presenter and entrepreneur, resident in the United Kingdom.

His books and television programmes discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy’s relevance to everyday life. At 23, he published Essays In Love (1993), which went on to sell two million copies. He is a founding member of The School of Life, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (frsl).

RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY ALAIN DE BOTTON

A KINDER, GENTLER, PHILOSOPHY OF SUCCESS TED GLOBAL 2009 We live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises. For me they normally happen on a Sunday evening, just as the sun is starting to set, and the gap between my hopes for myself, and the reality of my life, start to diverge so painfully that I normally end up weeping into a pillow.

I’m mentioning all this because I think this is not merely a personal problem. You may think I’m wrong in this, but I think that we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by moments when what we thought we knew, about our lives, about our careers, comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality.

It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living.

It’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm – to be free of

‘IT’S EASIER THAN EVER TO MAKE A LIVING. IT’S HARDER THAN EVER TO STAY CALM’

career anxiety. I want to look now, if I may, at some of the reasons why we might be feeling anxiety about our careers. Why we might be victims of these career crises, as we’re weeping softly into our pillows.

One of the reasons why we might be suffering is that we are surrounded by snobs. In a way, I’ve got some bad news, particularly to anybody who’s come to Oxford from abroad.

There is a real problem with snobbery. Because sometimes people from outside the U.K. imagine that snobbery is a distinctively U.K. phenomenon fixated on country houses and titles. The bad news is that’s not true. Snobbery is a global phenomenon. We are a global organization. This is a global phenomenon. It exists. What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are.

That is snobbery.

The dominant kind of snobbery that exists nowadays is job snobbery. You encounter it within minutes at a party, when you get asked that famous iconic question of the early 21st century, “What do you do?” And according to how you answer that question, people

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‘WE ARE SURROUNDED

BY SNOBBERY; IT’S A GLOBAL PHENOMENON’

are either incredibly delighted to see you, or look at their watch and make their excuses. (Laughter) Now, the opposite of a snob is your mother. (Laughter) Not necessarily your mother, or indeed mine but, as it were, the ideal mother – somebody who doesn’t care about your achievements. But, unfortunately, most people are not our mothers. Most people make a strict correlation between how much time – and if you like, love (not romantic love, though that may be something), love in general, respect – they are willing to accord us, that will be strictly defined by

our position in the social hierarchy.

And that’s a lot of the reason why we care so much about our careers and indeed start caring so much about material goods. You know, we’re often told that we live in very materialistic times, that we’re all greedy people. I don’t think we are particularly materialistic. I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional rewards we want. And that’s a new way of looking at luxury goods. The next time you see somebody driving a Ferrari don’t think, “This is somebody who is greedy.” Think, “This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love.” In other words, feel sympathy, rather than contempt. (Laughter) There are other reasons why it’s perhaps harder now to feel calm than ever before.

One of these – and it’s paradoxical because it’s linked to something that’s rather nice – is the hope we all have for our careers. Never before have expectations been so high about what human beings can achieve with their lifespan. We’re told, from many sources, that anyone can achieve anything. We’ve done away with the caste system. We are now in a system where anyone can rise to any position they please. And it’s a beautiful idea.

Along with that is a kind of spirit of equality. We’re all basically equal. There are no strictly defined kind of hierarchies.

There is one really big problem with this, and that problem is envy. It’s a real taboo to mention envy, but if there is one dominant emotion in modern society, that is envy. And it’s linked to the spirit of equality. Let me explain. I think it would be very unusual for

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rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It’s not the material goods we want. It’s the

‘IF THERE’S ONE DOMINANT EMOTION IN MODERN SOCIETY, THAT IS ENVY’

anyone here, or anyone watching, to be envious of the Queen of England. Even though she is much richer than any of you are. And she’s got a very large house. The reason why we don’t envy her is because she’s too weird. She’s simply too strange. We can’t relate to her.

She speaks in a funny way. She comes from an odd place. So we can’t relate to her. And when you can’t relate to somebody, you don’t envy them.

‘THERE IS A REAL CORRELATION BETWEEN A SOCIETY THAT TELLS PEOPLE THAT THEY CAN DO ANYTHING AND THE EXISTENCE OF LOW SELF-ESTEEM’

The closer two people are, in age, in background, in the process of identification, the more there is a danger of envy (which is incidentally why none of you should ever go to a school reunion, because there is no stronger reference point than people one was at school with). But the problem, generally, of modern society, is that it turns the whole world into a school. Everybody is wearing jeans, everybody is the same. And yet, they’re not. So there is a spirit of equality, combined with deep inequalities. Which can make for a very stressful situation.

It’s probably as unlikely that you would nowadays become as rich and famous as Bill Gates, as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would accede to the ranks of the French aristocracy. But the point is, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s made to feel – by magazines

and other media outlets – that if you’ve got energy, a few bright ideas about technology, a garage, you too could start a major thing. (Laughter) And the consequences of this problem make themselves felt in bookshops. When you go to a large bookshop and look at the self-help sections – as I sometimes do – if you analyse self-help books that are produced in the world today, there are basically two kinds.

The first kind tells you, “You can do it! You can make it! Anything is possible!” And the other kind tells you how to cope with what we politely call “low self-esteem,” or impolitely call “feeling very bad about yourself.”

There is a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything and the existence of low self-esteem. So that’s another way in which something that is quite positive can have a nasty kickback. There is another reason why we might be feeling

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more anxious, about our careers, about our status in the world today, than ever before.

And it is, again, linked to something nice, and that nice thing is called meritocracy.

Everybody, all politicians on Left and Right, agree that meritocracy is a great thing, and we should all be trying to make our societies really, really meritocratic. In other words, what is a meritocratic society? A meritocratic society is one in which if you’ve got talent and energy and skill, you will get to the top. Nothing should hold you back. It’s a beautiful idea. The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication – and in a far more nasty way – believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there. In other words, your position in life comes to seem not accidental, but merited and deserved. And that makes failure seem much more crushing.

You know, in the Middle Ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an “unfortunate” – literally somebody who had not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of society, they may unkindly be

‘IT’S NO LONGER THE GODS WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR LIVES, IT’S US. WE’RE IN THE DRIVING SEAT’

described as a “loser.” There is a real difference between an ‘‘unfortunate’’ and a ‘‘loser’’, and that shows 400 years of evolution in society and our belief in who is responsible for our lives. It’s no longer the gods, it’s us. We’re in the driving seat.

That’s exhilarating if you’re doing well, and very crushing if you’re not. It leads, in the worst cases (in the analysis of a sociologist like Emil Durkheim) to increased rates of suicide. There are more suicides in developed individualistic countries than in any other part of the world. And some of the reason for that is that people take what happens to them extremely personally; they own their success, but they also own their failure.

Is there any relief from some of these pressures that I’ve just been outlining?

I think there is. I just want to turn to a few of them. Let’s take meritocracy; this idea that everybody deserves to get where they get to. I think it’s a crazy idea, completely crazy.

I will support any politician of Left and Right, with any halfway decent meritocratic idea.

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‘PEOPLE OWN THEIR SUCCESS, BUT THEY ALSO OWN THEIR FAILURE’

RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY ALAIN DE BOTTON

I am a meritocrat in that sense. But I think it’s insane to believe that we will ever make a society that is genuinely meritocratic.

It’s an impossible dream.

The idea that we will make a society where literally everybody is graded, the good at the top, and the bad at the bottom, done exactly as it should be, is impossible. There are simply too many random factors: accidents of birth, accidents of things dropping on people’s heads, illnesses, etc.

We will never get to grade them, never get to grade people as they should.

I’m drawn to a lovely quote by St. Augustine in “The City of God,” where he says, “It’s a sin to judge any man by his post.” In modern English that would mean it’s a sin to come to any view of who you should talk to dependent on their business card.

It’s not the post that should count. According to St. Augustine, it’s only God who can really put everybody in their place. And he’s going to do that on the Day of Judgment with angels and trumpets, and the skies will open. Insane idea, if you’re a secularist person, like me. But something very valuable in that idea, nevertheless.

In other words, hold your horses when you’re coming to judge people. You don’t necessarily know what someone’s true value is. That is an unknown part of them. And we shouldn’t behave as though it is known. There is another source of solace and comfort for all this. When we think about failing in life, when we think about failure, one of the reasons why we fear failing is not just a loss of income, a loss of status. What we fear is the judgment and ridicule of others. And it exists.

You know, the number one organ of ridicule nowadays,

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‘THE IDEA THAT EVERYBODY DESERVES TO GET WHERE THEY GET TO; I THINK IT’S COMPLETELY CRAZY’

is the newspaper. And if you open the newspaper any day of the week, it’s full of people who’ve messed up their lives. They’ve slept with the wrong person. They’ve taken the wrong substance. They’ve passed the wrong piece of legislation. Whatever it is. And then are fit for ridicule. In other words, they have failed. And they are described as “losers.” Now, is there any alternative to this? I think the Western tradition shows us one glorious alternative, and that is tragedy.

Tragic art, as it developed in the theatres of ancient Greece, in the fifth century B.C., was essentially an art form devoted to tracing how people fail, and also according them a level of sympathy, which ordinary life would not necessarily accord them. I remember a few years ago, I was thinking about all this, and I went to see “The Sunday Sport,”(a tabloid newspaper that I don’t recommend you to start reading if you’re not familiar with it already). I went

to talk to them about a certain one of the great tragedies of Western art. I wanted to see how they would seize the bare bones of certain stories if they came in as a news item at the news desk on a Saturday afternoon.

So I told them about Othello. They had not heard of it but were fascinated by it.

(Laughter) And I asked them to write the headline for the story of Othello. They came up with “Love-Crazed Immigrant Kills Senator’s Daughter” splashed across the headline.

I gave them the plot-line of Madame Bovary. Again, a book they were enchanted to discover.

And they wrote “Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic After Credit Fraud.” (Laughter) And then my favourite. They really do have a kind of genius all of their own, these guys. My favourite is Sophocles’ Oedipus the King: “Sex With Mum Was Blinding”.

(Laughter and applause) In a way, if you like, at one end of the spectrum of sympathy, you’ve got the tabloid newspaper. At the other end of the spectrum you’ve got tragedy and tragic art, and I suppose I’m arguing that we should learn a little bit about what’s happening in tragic art.

It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser. He is not a loser, though he has lost. And I think that is the message of tragedy to us, and why it’s so very, very important, I think.

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anxiety is that we have nothing at its centre that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don’t worship anything other than ourselves. We think very highly of ourselves, and so we should. We’ve put people on the moon. We’ve done all sorts of extraordinary things. And so we tend to worship ourselves.

Our heroes are human heroes. That’s a very new situation.

Most other societies have had, right at their centre, the worship of something transcendent: a god, a spirit, a natural force, the universe. Whatever it is, something else that is being worshipped.

We’ve slightly lost the habit of doing that, which is, I think, why we’re particularly drawn to nature. Not for the sake of our health – though it’s often presented that way – but because it’s an escape from the human anthill. It’s an escape from our own competition,

RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY ALAIN DE BOTTON

The other thing about modern society and why it causes this

‘LET’S ACCEPT THE STRANGENESS OF SOME OF OUR IDEAS. LET’S PROBE AWAY AT OUR NOTIONS OF SUCCESS. LET’S MAKE SURE OUR IDEAS OF SUCCESS ARE TRULY OUR OWN.’

and our own dramas. And that’s why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human, and that is so deeply important to us.

What I think I’ve been talking about really is success and failure. And one of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. If I said to you that there is somebody behind the screen who is very, very successful, certain ideas would immediately come to mind. You would think that person might have made a lot of money, achieved renown in some field. I’m somebody who is very interested in success. I really want to be successful. I’m always thinking, “How could I be more successful?” But as I get older, I’m also very nuanced about what that word “success” might mean.

Here’s an insight that I’ve had about success: you can’t be successful at everything.

We hear a lot of talk about work-life balance. Nonsense. You can’t have it all. You can’t. So any vision of success has to admit what it’s losing out on, where the element of loss is.

I think any wise life will accept, as I say, that there is going to be an element where we are not succeeding.

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The thing about a successful life is, a lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They are sucked in from other people: chiefly, if you’re a man, your father, and if you’re a woman, your mother. Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years. No one is quite listening hard enough, but I very much believe that that’s true.

And we also suck in messages from everything from the television, to advertising, to marketing, etc. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. When we’re told that banking is a very respectable profession a lot of us want to go into banking.

When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. We are highly open to suggestion.

So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them – that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out at the end of a journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.

So I’m going to end it there. But what I really want to stress is by all means, success, yes. But let’s accept the strangeness of some of our ideas.

Let’s probe away at our notions of success. Let’s make sure our ideas of success are truly our own. Thank you very much. (Applause)

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QUESTIONS Chris Anderson: That was fascinating. How do you reconcile this idea of it being bad to think of someone as a loser with the idea – that a lot of people like – of seizing control of your life. And that a society that encourages that perhaps has to have some winners and losers.

Alain de Botton: Yes. I think it’s merely the randomness of the winning and losing process that I wanted to stress. Because the emphasis nowadays is so much on the justice of everything, and politicians always talk about justice. Now I am a firm believer in justice, I just think that it is impossible.

So we should do everything we can, we should do everything we can to pursue it. But at the end of the day we should always remember that whoever is facing us, whatever has happened in their lives, there will be a strong element of the haphazard. And it’s that I’m trying to leave room for.

Because otherwise it can get quite claustrophobic. ca: I mean, do you believe that you can combine your kind of kinder, gentler philosophy of work with a successful economy? Or do you think that you can’t? But it doesn’t matter that much that we’re putting too much emphasis on that? ab: The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueller the environment the more people will rise to the challenge. You want to think, who would you like as your ideal dad? And your ideal dad is somebody who is tough but gentle. And it’s a very hard line to make. We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian, disciplinarian, on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no rules option.

MALCOLM GLADWELL JOURNALIST � AUTHOR � SPEAKER � ENTREPRENEUR

Malcolm Gladwell (born 1963) is an EnglishCanadian journalist, best-selling author, and speaker. Detective of fads and emerging subcultures, chronicler of jobs-you-neverknew-existed, his work topples the popular understanding of bias, crime, food, marketing, race, consumers and intelligence. A New Yorker staff writer since 1996, sparkling with curiosity, undaunted by difficult research, his work uncovers truths hidden in strange data. The author of five books, Gladwell’s writing often deals with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences, particularly in the areas of sociology, psychology, and social psychology.

PSYCHOLOGY MALCOLM GLADWELL

CHOICE, HAPPINESS AND SPAGHETTI SAUCE TED2004 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

‘ALTHOUGH MY BOOK MAKES ME HAPPY, IT’S NOT REALLY ABOUT HAPPINESS’

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 psycho-physicist.

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 – 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 8 and 12 percent. Anything

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‘I DATED A PSYCHOPHYSICIST FOR TWO YEARS, WHICH SHOULD TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT THAT RELATIONSHIP’

sweet spot between 8 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 – 8 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

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take the most popular concentration. Right? Really simple.

PSYCHOLOGY MALCOLM GLADWELL

below 8 percent sweetness is not sweet enough; anything above 12 percent sweetness is too sweet. We want to know: what’s the

‘THIS WAS ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANT BREAKTHROUGHS IN ALL OF FOOD SCIENCE’

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 bedevilled 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 analysed 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!” He tried to get business, nobody would hire

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‘SEVENTY-ONE DIFFERENT KINDS OF OLIVE OIL: THIS WAS HOWARD’S GIFT TO AMERICAN PEOPLE’

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 – it was, technically speaking better tomato 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 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 favourite 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;

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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

PSYCHOLOGY MALCOLM GLADWELL

he went to Chicago; he went to Jacksonville; he went to Los Angeles. And he brought in people by the truckload. Into big halls.

‘IT IS CRITICAL TO UNDERSTAND THAT WE CANNOT ALWAYS EXPLAIN WHAT WE WANT DEEP DOWN’

months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. And then he analysed 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 analyse 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 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 7 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,

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‘MOST OF YOU LIKE MILKY, WEAK COFFEE BUT YOU WILL NEVER SAY YOU WANT A MILKY, WEAK COFFEE’

and you look at how many Ragus there are – do you know how many they are? 36! In 6 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 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. (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,

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‘THE WAY TO MAKE PEOPLE HAPPY IS TO GIVE THEM SOMETHING EXPENSIVE, SOMETHING TO ASPIRE TO. RIGHT? WRONG!’

‘MUSTARD DOES NOT EXIST ON A HIERARCHY, BUT ON A HORIZONTAL PLANE’

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 the 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 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 enamelled 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

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PSYCHOLOGY MALCOLM GLADWELL

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.

The 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 fuelled 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,

‘GENETICS HAS OPENED THE DOOR TO THE STUDY OF HUMAN VARIABILITY’

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: 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

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‘WHEN WE PERSUE UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES IN FOOD WE ARE DOING OURSELVES A MASSIVE DISSERVICE’

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 just know how, necessarily, cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. I guess my cancer is different from your cancer. Genetics has opened 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. 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 on, 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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‘IN EMBRACING THE DIVERSITY OF HUMAN BEINGS, WE WILL FIND A SURER WAY TO TRUE HAPPINESS’

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ONE HUNDRED OF THE BEST TED SPEAKERS OF ALL TIME

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100 OF THE BEST TED SPEAKERS ALL inTIME worth spreading.OF It started 1984 as a conference to ted is a non-profit organisation devoted to ideas

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