One hundred of the best TED speakers of all time, people who’ve done so much to shape how we see the world.
TED is a small non-profit organisation devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. TED started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds:
Technology, Entertainment and 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. 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.
1984-2014 Celebrating 30 years of TED
Ideas Worth Spreading.
“At each TED conference something important happens to me: a new business, a new friend. I return exhilarated.�
J.J. Abrahams The Mystery Box
13
Chimamanda Adichie The danger of a single story
29
David Carson Design and discovery
45
Peter Gabriel Fight injustice with raw video
61
Herbie Hancock An all-star set
77
Jose Antonio Abreu Kids Transformed by Music
21
Edward Burtynsky Photographing the landscape of oil
37
Cameron Carpenter Transforming energy into music
53
Frank Gehry A master architect asks, now what?
69
Chris Jordan Turning powerful stats into art
85
Mathieu Lehanneur Science inspired design
93
Ross Lovegrove Organic design, inspired by nature
101
William McDonough Cradle to cradle design
117
James Nachtwey Let my photographs bear witness
133
Plan B Youth, music and London
159
Franco Sacchi A tour of Nollywood
175
Stefan Sagmeister The power of time off
191
Cameron Sinclair A call for open-source architecture
207
Anna Deavre Smith Four American characters
223
John Q. Walker Great piano performances, recreated
239
John Maeda My journey in design
109
Vik Muniz Art with wine, sugar, chocolate and string
125
Jehane Noujaim A global day of film
141
Joshua Prince-Ramus Building a theater that remakes itself
167
Marcus Du Sautoy Symmetry, reality’s riddle
183
Paula Scher Great design is serious, not solemn
199
Philippe Starck Design and destiny
215
Stephan Van Dan Talks Maps
231
Benjamin Zander The transformative power of classical music
247
Art and Design Stefan Sagmeister
192 BIOGRAPHY
Stefan Sagmeister, born 1962 in Bregenz, Austria, is a New York-based graphic designer and typographer. He has his own design firm called Sagmeister Inc based in New York City. He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith and Pat Metheny.
Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He later
received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York. He began
his design career at the age of 15 at “Alphorn”, an Austrian Youth magazine, which is
named after the traditional Alpine musical instrument. In 1991, he moved to Hong Kong
to work the Leo Burnett’s Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to
work Tibor Kalman’s M&Co design firm. His tenure there was short lived, as Kalman soon decided to retire from the design business to edit Colors magazine for the Benetton Group in Rome.
He then proceeded to form the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has
since designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling
Stones, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner. Sagmeister Inc. has employed designers including Martin Woodtli, and Hjalti Karlsson and Jan Wilker, who later formed Karlssonwilker. Sagmeister is a long-standing artistic collaborator with musicians David
Byrne and Lou Reed. He is the author of the design monograph “Made You Look” which was published by Booth-Clibborn editions.
Solo shows on Sagmeister Inc’s work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New
York, Berlin, Japan, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, and Seoul. He teaches in the graduate
department of the School of Visual Arts in New York and has been appointed as the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York. He has received a Grammy
Award in 2005 in Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package category for art directing Once in a Lifetime box set by Talking Heads. He would also work on the 2008 David Byrne and Brian Eno album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.
His motto is “Design that needed guts from the creator and still carries the ghost of
“Having guts always works out for me.”
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.
Art and Design Stefan Sagmeister
194 TRANSCRIPT
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
society at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two.
There is a fellow TEDster who spoke
always difficult to accomplish during the
two years ago, Jonathan Haidt, who
not available for any of our clients. We are
And they rang very true for me. I can see
regular working year. In that year 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
defined his work into three different levels. 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 levelling 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,
started to look the same. You see here
but I did look for nature. I had spent my
the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged
for something different for the second
a glass eye in a die cut of a book. Quite
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
first sabbatical in New York City. Looked 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 craftoriented society.
I arrived there in September 2008, and
be helpful to basically cut off five of those
pretty much started to work right away.
between those working years. That’s clearly
from the area itself. However the first thing
retirement years and intersperse them in 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
There is wonderful inspiration coming 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
Art and Design Stefan Sagmeister
195 TRANSCRIPT
wild dogs that surround my house, and
attacked me during my morning walks. So we created this series of 99 portraits on t-shirts. Every single dog on one t-shirt. As a little retaliation with a just ever so
slightly menacing message on the back of the shirt.
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, I had finally made piece with those dogs.
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
The happy film, 2013 by Sagmeister
Art and Design Stefan Sagmeister
196 TRANSCRIPT
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 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
people who have actually done it much
little requests. Sending mail to Japanese
had the idea of doing one, the process was
I became my own intern.
daily planner book. And then I told as many,
things I was interested in, put them in a
that there was no way that I could chicken
time and then made a plan, very much
better than myself envisioning it. When I I made the decision and I put it into my
design magazines and things like that. So And I very quickly made a list of the
many people as I possibly could about it so
hierarchy, divided them into chunks of
out later on.
like in grade school. What does it say
sabbatical, it was rather disastrous. I had
Nine to ten: future thinking. Was not very
plan, that this vacuum of time somehow
that actually, specifically as a starting point
generation. It was not. I just, without a plan
for me. What came out of it? I really got
requests, those I all said no to, but other
seen over the long term, it was actually
In the beginning, on the first
here? Monday eight to nine: story writing.
thought that I should do this without any
successful. And so on and so forth. And
would be wonderful and enticing for idea
of the first sabbatical, worked really well
I just reacted to little requests, not work
close to design again. I had fun. Financially,
time. And if I look at companies that are
successful. Because of the improved
quality, we could ask for higher prices.
actually more successful than mine, 3M,
And probably most importantly,
since the 1930s is giving all their engineers
basically everything we’ve done in the
There is some good successes. Scotch
came out of thinking of that one single year.
15 percent to pursue whatever they want.
seven years following the first sabbatical
tape came out of this program, as well
And I’ll show you a couple of projects that
as Art Fry developed sticky notes from
came out of the seven years following that
during his personal time for 3M. Google,
sabbatical. One of the strands of thinking
of course, very famously gives 20 percent
I was involved in was that sameness is
for their software engineers to pursue their
so incredibly overrated. This whole idea
own personal projects.Anybody in here
that everything needs to be exactly the
has actually ever conducted a sabbatical?
same works for a very very few strand of
That’s about five percent of everybody.
companies, and not for everybody else.
So I’m not sure if you saw your neighbour
We were asked to design an identity
putting their hand up. Talk to them about
for Casa de Musica, the Rem Koolhaas-
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
built music center in Porto, in Portugal. Set the twilight Reeling, Lou Reed 1996
And even though I desired to do an identity that doesn’t use the architecture, I failed
Art and Design Stefan Sagmeister
197 TRANSCRIPT
at that. And mostly also because I realized
the building. It has a more transparent
the city of Porto where he talked about
Or there’s a smaller contemporary
out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to a conglomeration of various layers of meaning. Which I understood after I
translated it from architecture speech in to regular English, basically as logo
making. And I understood that the building itself was a logo.
So then it became quite easy. We put
a mask on it, looked at it deep down in
the ground, checked it out from all sides,
west, north, south, east, top and bottom. Coloured them in a very particular way
by having a friend of mine write a piece of software, the Casa de Musica Logo
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.
Second insight. Until that point I had
Beethoven image. And the software, in a
was fine with me. On one hand I have
second, will give you the Casa de Musica
have to design a Beethoven poster, comes in handy because the visual information of
Either act or forget.”
title. And one of the handy things that
been mostly involved or used the language
Beethoven logo. Which, when you actually
“Complaining is silly.
orchestra, 12 people that remixes its own
Generator. That’s connected to a scanner. You put any image in there, like that SVA subway poster series, 2013
identity. The truck they go on tour with.
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
of design for promotional purposes, which 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”. 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.
Art and Design Stefan Sagmeister
198 TRANSCRIPT
And then the city of Amsterdam gave
us a plaza and asked us to do something. We used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece. We got 250 thousand
coins from the central bank, at different
darknesses. So we got brand new ones, shiny ones, medium ones, and very old, dark ones. And with the help of 100
volunteers, over a week, created this fairly
floral typography that spelled, “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better.” And the idea of course was to make
the type so precious that as an audience
you would be in between, “Should I really
nearby pigs to do the titles for us. They
weren’t quite slick enough. So we asked the goose to do it again, and hoped she would do somehow, a more elegant or
pretty job. And I think she overdid it. Just a bit too ornamental. And my studio is
very close to the monkey forest. And the monkeys in that monkey forest looked,
actually, fairly happy. So we asked those guys to do it again. They did a fine job,
but had a couple of readability problems.
So of course whatever you don’t really do yourself doesn’t really get done properly. That film we’ll be working on for the
take as much money as I can? Or should
next two years. So It’s going to be a while.
While we built all this up during that week,
a film on happiness might not really be
I leave the piece intact as it is right now?” with the hundred volunteers, a good
number of the neighbours 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 neighbours 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. I think you see, you see them sweeping. 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.
We are also working on the start of
a bigger project in Bali. It’s a movie about happiness. And here we asked some
And of course you might think that doing
worthwhile, then you can of course always go and see this guy.
Video: And I’m happy I’m alive. I’m happy I’m alive. I’m happy I’m alive.
Stefan Sagmeister: Thank you. ©2008 TED
256
“Truly an amazing experience.”
Richard Branson Life at 30,000 feet
265
Seth Godin This is broken
281
Tim Jackson An economic reality check
297
Jacqueline Novogratz Invest in Africa’s own solutions
313
Stephen Petranek 10 ways the world could end
329
Malcolm Gladwell Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce
273
Bjarke Ingels Hedonistic sustainability
289
Amory Lovins Winning the oil endgame
305
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Aid versus trade
321
Jill Tarter A new way to fund space exploration
337
274
Business and Economics Malcolm Gladwell
BIOGRAPHY
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 over-estimated 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 honoured 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. • • • • • •
“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”
Credentials
Staff writer for The New Yorker
Author of: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw and David and Goliath Member of the Order of Canada
Honorary doctorate of letters, University of Toronto
Former science and medicine writer for The Washington Post Winner of the National Magazine Award
Business and Economics Malcolm Gladwell
276 TRANSCRIPT
I think I was supposed to talk about
clients was - this is many years ago,
and it’s about snap judgments and first
clients was Pepsi. And Pepsi came to
my new book, which is called “Blink,”
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
back in the early ‘70s - one of his first 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
tell you something about that relationship.
experiment, and he gets the data back,
measuring things. And Howard is very
sudden he realizes it’s not a nice bell curve.
As far as I know, psychophysics is about 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
and he plots it on a curve, and all of a
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
Business and Economics Malcolm Gladwell
277 TRANSCRIPT
when the data comes back a mess. They
back to them and he said, “You don’t just
people think about cola’s not that easy.
to create zesty.” And that’s where we got
think, well, you know, figuring out what
need to improve your regular; you need
You know, maybe we made an error
zesty pickles. Then the next person came
somewhere along the way. You know, let’s
to him, and that was Campbell’s Soup.
just make an educated guess, and they
And this was even more important. In fact,
simply point and they go for 10 percent,
Campbell’s Soup is where Howard
right in the middle. Howard is not so easily
made his reputation. Campbell’s made
placated. Howard is a man of a certain
Prego, and Prego, in the early ‘80s, was
degree of intellectual standards. And this
struggling next to Ragu, which was the
was not good enough for him, and this
dominant spaghetti sauce of the ‘70s and
question bedeviled him for years. And he
‘80s. Now in the industry - I don’t know
would think it through and say, what was
whether you care about this, or how much
wrong? Why could we not make sense of
time I have to go into this. But it was,
this experiment with Diet Pepsi?
technically speaking - this is an aside -
And one day, he was sitting in a diner
Prego is a better tomato sauce
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
than Ragu. The quality of the tomato Blink book cover, 2005
the Diet Pepsi data, they were asking the
about? This is craziness.” And they would
perfect Pepsi, and they should have been
business, nobody would hire him - he was
This was an enormous revelation. This was
it and talked about it and talked about
all of food science. And Howard
“To a worm in horseradish, the world is
would go to conferences around the
was obsessed with it!
would say, “You had been looking for the
Vlasic Pickles came to him, and they said,
be looking for the perfect Pepsis.” And
want to make the perfect pickle.” And he
and they would say, “What are you talking
are only perfect pickles.” And he came
wrong question. They were looking for the
say, you know, “Move! Next!” Tried to get
looking for the perfect Pepsis. Trust me.
obsessed, though, and he talked about
one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in
it. Howard loves the Yiddish expression
immediately went on the road, and he
horseradish.” This was his horseradish. He
country, and he would stand up and he
And finally, he had a breakthrough.
perfect Pepsi. You’re wrong. You should
“Mr. Moskowitz - Doctor Moskowitz - we
people would look at him with a blank look,
said, “There is no perfect pickle; there
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
Business and Economics Malcolm Gladwell
278 TRANSCRIPT
45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. And he
that all Americans fall into one of three
all wrong!” And that’s when you started
way that you can vary tomato sauce: by
spaghetti sauce plain; there are people
and 14 different kinds of mustard, and
there are people who like it extra chunky.
eventually even Ragu hired Howard, and
the most significant, because at the
Ragu that he did for Prego. And today,
supermarket, you would not find extra-
good one, and you look at how many
to Howard, and they said, “You telling me
they are? 36! In six varieties: Cheese,
chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is
Traditional, Extra-Chunky Garden. That’s
And Prego then went back, and completely
the American people.
came out with a line of extra chunky that
fact, enormously important. I’ll explain
the spaghetti sauce business in this
fundamentally changed the way the
made 600 million dollars off their line of
happy. Assumption number one in the
varied them according to every conceivable sweetness, by level of garlic, by tartness,
by sourness, by tomatoey-ness, by visible solids - my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business. 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
groups. There are people who like their
to get seven different kinds of vinegar,
who like their spaghetti sauce spicy; and
71 different kinds of olive oil - and then
And of those three facts, the third one was
Howard did the exact same thing for
time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a
if you go to the supermarket, a really
chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned
Ragus there are - do you know how many
that one third of Americans crave extra-
Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World
servicing their needs?” And he said yes!
Howard’s doing. That is Howard’s gift to
reformulated their spaghetti sauce, and
Now why is that important? It is, in
immediately and completely took over
to you why. What Howard did is he
country. And over the next 10 years, they
food industry thinks about making you
extra-chunky sauces.
food industry used to be that the way to
looked at what Howard had done, and they
will make people happy - is to ask them.
And everyone else in the industry
said, “Oh my god! We’ve been thinking
“Who we are cannot be
find out what people want to eat - what 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
separated from where
want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what
we are from.”
all those years - 20, 30 years - through
you want in a spaghetti sauce.” And for all those focus group sessions, no one
congregate around certain ideas. And sure
ever said they wanted extra-chunky. Even
all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize
their hearts, actually did.
enough, if you sit down, and you analyze
though at least a third of them, deep in
Business and Economics Malcolm Gladwell
279 TRANSCRIPT
25 and 27 percent of you. Most of you like
have any Grey Poupon? And the whole
say to someone who asks you what you
takes off! Takes over the mustard business!
milky, weak coffee. But you will never, ever want that “I want a milky, weak coffee.” 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. Prego traditional spaghetti sauce People don’t know what they want!
French’s and Gulden’s. What were they?
Yellow mustard. What’s in yellow mustard? Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and
thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon 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
Right? As Howard loves to say, “The mind
paprika. That was mustard. Grey Poupon
mystery! And a critically important step in
more volatile brown mustard seed, some
is to realize that we cannot always explain
aromatics. And what do they do? They put
you, for example, in this room, what you
enameled label on it, made it look French,
perhaps the most important, is Howard
say? Every one of you would say, “I want
And instead of charging a dollar-fifty for the
What do I mean by that? For the longest
always say when you ask them what they
and Gulden’s did, they decided to charge
rich, hearty roast! What percentage of you
right? With the guy in the Rolls Royce, and
According to Howard, somewhere between
Rolls Royce pulls up, and he says, do you
knows not what the tongue wants.” It’s a
came along, with a Dijon. Right? Much
understanding our own desires and tastes
white wine, a nose hit, much more delicate
what we want deep down. If I asked all of
it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful
want in a coffee, you know what you’d
even though it’s made in Oxnard, California.
a dark, rich, hearty roast.” It’s what people
eight-ounce bottle, the way that French’s
want in a coffee. What do you like? Dark,
four dollars. And then they had those ads,
actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast?
he’s eating the Grey Poupon. The other
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
confronted the notion of the Platonic dish. 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 some-
thing something reduction. They don’t give
Business and Economics Malcolm Gladwell
280 TRANSCRIPT
you five options on the reduction, right?
were looking for cooking universals. They
needs to happen in the world of tomato
chunky reduction, or do you want the - no!
us. And it’s good reason for them to be
vote of thanks.
They don’t say, do you want the extra-
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
were looking for one way to treat all of obsessed with the idea of universals,
variability, and that is - oh, I’m sorry.
obsessed with universals. Psychologists,
took it a second step, which was to say
19th century and much of the 20th, was medical scientists, economists were all interested in finding out the rules that
govern the way all of us behave. But that
changed, right? What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals
to the understanding of variability. Now in medical science, we don’t want to know
how necessarily - just how cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. I guess my
cancer different from your cancer. Genetics has opened the door to the study of
human variability. What Howard Moskowitz
was doing was saying, this same revolution
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
difference between coffee at 60 and coffee
were we attached to that? Because we
at 78 is a difference between coffee that
thought that what it took to make people
makes you wince, and coffee that makes
happy was to provide them with the most
you deliriously happy. That is the final, and
culturally authentic tomato sauce, A; and
I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard
B, we thought that if we gave them the
Moskowitz: that in embracing the diversity
culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they
of human beings, we will find a surer way
would embrace it. And that’s what would
other words, people in the cooking world
Howard not only believed that, but he
scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78. The
of the pasta. That’s what it was. And why
And the reason we thought that - in
I’ll give you one last illustration of
because all of science, through the
bit over it and it sunk down to the bottom
please the maximum number of people.
sauce. And for that, we owe him a great
to true happiness. Thank you. Portrait for NRC, Malcolm Gladwell 2009
©2004 TED
346
“It was INCREDIBLE. I had a wonderful time and met a thousand fascinating people.”
Richard Baraniuk Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning
349
Bill Gates Mosquitos, malaria and education
365
Jamie Oliver Teach every child about food
381
Dave Eggers Once Upon a School
357
Salman Khan Let’s use video to reinvent education
373
390
“I wasn’t prepared for this conference to be so profound. The combined IQ of the attendees is incredible.”
David Blaine How I held my breath for 17 min.
393
Eduardo Dolhun The importance of Oral Rehydration Solutions
409
Nigel Marsh How to make work-life balance work
425
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev Wonder. Wonders.
441
Dan Buettner How to live to be 100+
401
Eve Ensler What security means to me
417
Tony Robbins Why we do what we do
433
450
“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.�
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow, the secret to happiness
452
Temple Grandin The world needs all kinds of minds
468
Daniel H. Pink The puzzle of motivation
484
Jim Fallon Exploring the mind of a killer
460
Pamela Meyer How to spot a liar
476
Clay Shirky How cognitive surplus will change the world
492
501
“It was our first time. It was like drinking from a firehose.�
Karen Armstrong The Charter for Compassion
Alain de Botton A kinder, gentler philosophy of success David Christian The history of our world in 18 minutes
503 511
519 Jonathan Haidt Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence 527 Rick Warren A life of purpose 535
544
“Words are inadequate to express my appreciation for the invitation to participate at the TED conference. It was one of the highlights of my entire life.�
Chris Anderson Why can’t we see evidence of alien life?
547
Christopher deCharms A look inside the brain in real time
563
David Deutsch A new way to explain explanation
579
Robert Fischell Three unusual medical inventions
595
Stephen Hawking Questioning the universe
611
Antony Garrett Lisi A theory of everything
627
Nicholas Negroponte One Laptop per Child
643
Larry Page The genesis of Google
659
George Smoot The design of the universe
675
Ed Ulbrich How Benjamin Button got his face
691
Curtis Wong A preview of the WorldWide Telescope
707
Jonathan Zittrain The Web as random acts of kindness
723
Steven Cowley Fusion is energy’s future
555
Richard Dawkins Why the universe seems so strange
571
Aubrey de Grey A roadmap to end aging
587
Brian Greene Is our universe the only universe?
603
William Kamkwamba How I built a windmill
619
Pranav Mistry Meet the SixthSense interaction
635
Bertrand Piccard My solar-powered adventure
651
Sir Martin Rees Is this our final century?
667
Neil Turok Find the next Einstein in Africa
683
Romulus Whitaker The real danger lurking in the water
699
Anders Ynnerman Visualizing the medical data explosion
715
732
“Being a part of TED was a genuine privilege. I’ve never experienced anything remotely like it. I was entertained, educated, enthralled, moved, challenged, intimidated, humbled and most of all inspired!�
Zeresenay Alemseged humanity’s roots
735
Johanna Blakley Social media and the end of gender
751
Nicholas Christakis How social networks predict epidemics
767
Al Gore What comes after An Inconvenient Truth?
783
Larry Lessig Re-examining the remix
799
Steven Pinker The surprising decline in violence
815
Deborah Scranton An Iraq war movie crowd-sourced from soldiers
831
James Balog Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss
743
Bono The good news on poverty (Yes, there’s good news)
759
Bill Clinton My wish, Rebuilding Rwanda
775
James Howard Kunstler The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs
791
Bjørn Lomborg Global priorities bigger than climate change
807
Iqbal Quadir How mobile phones can fight poverty
823
Jim Stolze Can you live without the Internet
839
Dennis van Engelsdorp A plea for bees
847
856
“I wish I’d started coming earlier.”
A
J.J. Abrams
13
Chimamanda Adichie
29
JosĂŠ Antonio Abreu
21
Zeresenay Alemseged
735
Karen Armstrong
503
Chris Anderson
B
547
Richard Baraniuk
349
James Balog
743
Alain de Botton
511
Richard Branson
265
Dan Buettner
401
David Blaine
393
Johanna Blakley
751
Bono
759
Edward Burtynsky
C
David Carson
37
45 519
Bill Clinton
775
Nicholas Christakis
767
Christopher deCharms
563
53
Steven Cowley
555
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
452
D
Eve Ensler
Dave Eggers F
Jim Fallon
Robert Fischell G
Peter Gabriel
571
Eduardo Dolhun
409
David Deutsch
579
Aubrey de Grey
587
357
460 595
61 365
Malcolm Gladwell
273
Al Gore
783
Brian Greene
603
Frank Gehry
69
Seth Godin
281
Temple Grandin
468
Jonathan Haidt
527
Stephen Hawking
611
Herbie Hancock
I
Bjarke Ingels J
Tim Jackson
Chris Jordan
Richard Dawkins
417
Bill Gates
H
Cameron Carpenter David Christian
E
K
77
289
297 85
William Kamkwamba
619
Salman Khan
373
James Howard Kunstler
791
L
Larry Lessig
799
Antony Garrett Lisi
627
Bjørn Lomborg
807
Amory Lovins
305
Mathieu Lehanneur Ross Lovegrove
M
93 101
109
William McDonough
117
Pranav Mistry
635
425
Pamela Meyer
476
Vik Muniz
125
N
James Nachtwey
133
Nicholas Negroponte
643
Jacqueline Novogratz
313
Jehane Noujaim
141
O
Jamie Oliver
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
381 321
R
Sir Martin Rees Tony Robbins
329
Steven Pinker
815
Larry Page
659
Joshua Prince-Ramus
167
Bertrand Piccard
651
Daniel H. Pink
484
Plan B
159
667 433
175
Stefan Sagmeister
191
Marcus du Sautoy
183
Paula Scher
199
Clay Shirky
492
George Smoot
675
Jim Stolze
839
Deborah Scranton
831
Cameron Sinclair
207
Philippe Starck
215
Anna Deavere Smith
223
T
Neil Turok U
V
337 683
691
Dennis van Engelsdorp
847
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev
441
Stephan Van Dam
W
John Q. Walker
239
Romulus Whitaker
699
Rick Warren
535
Curtis Wong
707
Y
Franco Sacchi
Ed Ulbrich
Stephen Petranek
823
Jill Tarter
P
Iqbal Quadir
S
John Maeda Nigel Marsh
Q
231
Anders Ynnerman Z
Benjamin Zander Jonathan Zittrain
715
247 723
“Sign me up for next year.”
http://www.ted.com
TED Conferences LLC 250 Hudson St. Suite 1002 New York
NY 10013
Telephone. 212.346.9333 Fax. 212.227.6397
Designed by Ruby Dewhirst