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I think I was supposed
to talk about my new book,

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which is called "Blink,"

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00:00:04,903 --> 00:00:07,647
and it's about snap judgments
and first impressions.

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And it comes out in January,
and I hope you all buy it in triplicate.

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(Laughter)

6
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But I was thinking about this,

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and I realized that although
my new book makes me happy,

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and I think would make my mother happy,

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it's not really about happiness.

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So I decided instead,
I would talk about someone

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who I think has done as much
to make Americans happy

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as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years,

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a man who is a great
personal hero of mine:

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someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz,

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who is most famous
for reinventing spaghetti sauce.

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Howard's about this high, and he's round,

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and he's in his 60s,
and he has big huge glasses

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and thinning gray hair,

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and he has a kind of wonderful
exuberance and vitality,

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and he has a parrot,
and he loves the opera,

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and he's a great aficionado
of medieval history.

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And by profession, he's a psychophysicist.

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Now, I should tell you that I have no idea
what psychophysics is,

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although at some point in my life,

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I dated a girl for two years

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who was getting
her doctorate in psychophysics.

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Which should tell you something
about that relationship.

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(Laughter)

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As far as I know, psychophysics
is about measuring things.

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And Howard is very interested
in measuring things.

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And he graduated
with his doctorate from Harvard,

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and he set up a little consulting shop
in White Plains, New York.

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And one of his first clients was Pepsi.

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This is many years ago,
back in the early 70s.

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And Pepsi came to Howard and they said,

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"You know, there's this new
thing called aspartame,

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and we would like to make Diet Pepsi.

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We'd like you to figure out

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how much aspartame we should put
in each can of Diet Pepsi

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in order to have the perfect drink."

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Now that sounds like an incredibly
straightforward question to answer,

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and that's what Howard thought.

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Because Pepsi told him,

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"We're working with a band
between eight and 12 percent.

45
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Anything below eight percent
sweetness is not sweet enough;

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anything above 12 percent
sweetness is too sweet.

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We want to know: what's the sweet
spot between 8 and 12?"

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Now, if I gave you this problem to do,
you would all say, it's very simple.

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What we do is you make up
a big experimental batch of Pepsi,

50
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at every degree of sweetness --
eight percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3,

51
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all the way up to 12 --

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and we try this out
with thousands of people,

53
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and we plot the results on a curve,

54
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and we take the most popular
concentration, right?

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Really simple.

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Howard does the experiment,
and he gets the data back,

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and he plots it on a curve,

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and all of a sudden he realizes
it's not a nice bell curve.

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In fact, the data doesn't make any sense.

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It's a mess. It's all over the place.

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Now, most people in that business,
in the world of testing food and such,

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are not dismayed
when the data comes back a mess.

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They think, "Well, you know,

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figuring out what people think
about cola's not that easy."

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"You know, maybe we made an error
somewhere along the way."

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"You know, let's just
make an educated guess,"

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and they simply point
and they go for 10 percent,

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right in the middle.

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Howard is not so easily placated.

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Howard is a man of a certain degree
of intellectual standards.

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And this was not good enough for him,

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and this question bedeviled him for years.

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And he would think it through
and say, "What was wrong?

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Why could we not make sense
of this experiment with Diet Pepsi?"

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And one day, he was sitting
in a diner in White Plains,

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about to go trying to dream up
some work for Nescafé.

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And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning,
the answer came to him.

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And that is, that when they analyzed
the Diet Pepsi data,

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they were asking the wrong question.

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They were looking for the perfect Pepsi,

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and they should have been
looking for the perfect Pepsis.

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Trust me.

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This was an enormous revelation.

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This was one of the most brilliant
breakthroughs in all of food science.

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Howard immediately went on the road,

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and he would go to conferences
around the country,

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and he would stand up and say,

88
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"You had been looking
for the perfect Pepsi.

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You're wrong.

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You should be looking
for the perfect Pepsis."

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And people would look at him
blankly and say,

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"What are you talking about? Craziness."

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And they would say, "Move! Next!"

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Tried to get business,
nobody would hire him --

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he was obsessed, though,

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and he talked about it
and talked about it.

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Howard loves the Yiddish expression

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"To a worm in horseradish,
the world is horseradish."

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This was his horseradish.

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(Laughter)

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He was obsessed with it!

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And finally, he had a breakthrough.

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Vlasic Pickles came to him,

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and they said, "Doctor Moskowitz,
we want to make the perfect pickle."

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And he said,

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"There is no perfect pickle;
there are only perfect pickles."

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And he came back to them and he said,

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"You don't just need
to improve your regular;

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you need to create zesty."

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And that's where we got zesty pickles.

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Then the next person came to him:
Campbell's Soup.

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And this was even more important.

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In fact, Campbell's Soup
is where Howard made his reputation.

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Campbell's made Prego,

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and Prego, in the early 80s,
was struggling next to Ragù,

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which was the dominant
spaghetti sauce of the 70s and 80s.

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In the industry -- I don't
know whether you care about this,

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or how much time I have to go into this.

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But it was, technically speaking
-- this is an aside --

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Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragù.

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The quality of the tomato paste
is much better;

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the spice mix is far superior;

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it adheres to the pasta
in a much more pleasing way.

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In fact, they would do
the famous bowl test

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back in the 70s with Ragù and Prego.

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You'd have a plate of spaghetti,
and you would pour it on, right?

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And the Ragù would all go to the bottom,
and the Prego would sit on top.

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That's called "adherence."

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And, anyway, despite the fact
that they were far superior in adherence,

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and the quality of their tomato paste,

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Prego was struggling.

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So they came to Howard,
and they said, fix us.

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And Howard looked
at their product line, and he said,

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what you have is a dead tomato society.

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So he said, this is what I want to do.

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And he got together
with the Campbell's soup kitchen,

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and he made 45 varieties
of spaghetti sauce.

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And he varied them according
to every conceivable way

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that you can vary tomato sauce:

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by sweetness, by level of garlic,

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by tomatoey-ness,
by tartness, by sourness,

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by visible solids --

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my favorite term
in the spaghetti sauce business.

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(Laughter)

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Every conceivable way
you can vary spaghetti sauce,

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he varied spaghetti sauce.

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And then he took this whole raft
of 45 spaghetti sauces,

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and he went on the road.

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He went to New York, to Chicago,

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he went to Jacksonville, to Los Angeles.

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And he brought in people
by the truckload into big halls.

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And he sat them down for two hours,

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and over the course of that two hours,
he gave them ten bowls.

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Ten small bowls of pasta,

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with a different spaghetti
sauce on each one.

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And after they ate each bowl,
they had to rate, from 0 to 100,

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how good they thought
the spaghetti sauce was.

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At the end of that process,
after doing it for months and months,

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he had a mountain of data

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about how the American people
feel about spaghetti sauce.

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And then he analyzed the data.

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Did he look for the most popular
variety of spaghetti sauce?

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No! Howard doesn't believe
that there is such a thing.

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Instead, he looked
at the data, and he said,

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let's see if we can group all these
different data points into clusters.

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Let's see if they congregate
around certain ideas.

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And sure enough, if you sit down,

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and you analyze all this data
on spaghetti sauce,

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you realize that all Americans
fall into one of three groups.

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There are people
who like their spaghetti sauce plain;

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there are people
who like their spaghetti sauce spicy;

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and there are people
who like it extra chunky.

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And of those three facts,
the third one was the most significant,

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because at the time, in the early 1980s,

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if you went to a supermarket,

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you would not find
extra-chunky spaghetti sauce.

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And Prego turned to Howard, and they said,

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"You're telling me
that one third of Americans

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crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce

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and yet no one is servicing their needs?"

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And he said "Yes!"

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(Laughter)

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And Prego then went back,

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and completely reformulated
their spaghetti sauce,

185
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and came out with a line of extra chunky
that immediately and completely

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took over the spaghetti sauce
business in this country.

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And over the next 10 years,
they made 600 million dollars

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off their line of extra-chunky sauces.

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Everyone else in the industry looked
at what Howard had done, and they said,

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"Oh my god! We've been
thinking all wrong!"

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And that's when you started to get
seven different kinds of vinegar,

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and 14 different kinds of mustard,
and 71 different kinds of olive oil.

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And then eventually
even Ragù hired Howard,

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and Howard did the exact same thing
for Ragù that he did for Prego.

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And today, if you go
to a really good supermarket,

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do you know how many Ragùs there are?

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36!

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In six varieties:

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Cheese, Light,

200
00:09:00,635 --> 00:09:03,737
Robusto, Rich & Hearty,

201
00:09:03,761 --> 00:09:05,071
Old World Traditional --

202
00:09:07,483 --> 00:09:09,200
Extra-Chunky Garden.

203
00:09:09,224 --> 00:09:10,976
(Laughter)

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That's Howard's doing.

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00:09:12,768 --> 00:09:14,976
That is Howard's gift
to the American people.

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Now why is that important?

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(Laughter)

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It is, in fact, enormously important.

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I'll explain to you why.

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What Howard did is he fundamentally
changed the way the food industry thinks

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00:09:26,644 --> 00:09:28,065
about making you happy.

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Assumption number one
in the food industry used to be

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that the way to find out
what people want to eat,

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00:09:34,724 --> 00:09:37,061
what will make people happy,
is to ask them.

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00:09:37,628 --> 00:09:39,286
And for years and years and years,

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Ragù and Prego would have focus groups,

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and they would sit you down,
and they would say,

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"What do you want in a spaghetti sauce?

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Tell us what you want
in a spaghetti sauce."

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And for all those years -- 20, 30 years --

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through all those focus group sessions,

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no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky.

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Even though at least a third of them,
deep in their hearts, actually did.

224
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(Laughter)

225
00:10:02,696 --> 00:10:04,708
People don't know what they want!

226
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As Howard loves to say,

227
00:10:06,202 --> 00:10:08,954
"The mind knows not
what the tongue wants."

228
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It's a mystery!

229
00:10:10,154 --> 00:10:11,158
(Laughter)

230
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And a critically important step

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00:10:13,612 --> 00:10:16,943
in understanding
our own desires and tastes

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is to realize that we cannot always
explain what we want, deep down.

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If I asked all of you, for example,
in this room, what you want in a coffee,

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you know what you'd say?

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Every one of you would say,
"I want a dark, rich, hearty roast."

236
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It's what people always say
when you ask them.

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

238
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What percentage of you actually
like a dark, rich, hearty roast?

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According to Howard, somewhere
between 25 and 27 percent of you.

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00:10:43,567 --> 00:10:45,762
Most of you like milky, weak coffee.

241
00:10:45,786 --> 00:10:46,787
(Laughter)

242
00:10:46,811 --> 00:10:50,143
But you will never, ever say
to someone who asks you what you want

243
00:10:50,167 --> 00:10:52,358
that "I want a milky, weak coffee."

244
00:10:52,382 --> 00:10:55,281
So that's number one thing
that Howard did.

245
00:10:56,528 --> 00:10:59,976
Number two thing that Howard did
is he made us realize --

246
00:11:00,000 --> 00:11:01,976
it's another very critical point --

247
00:11:02,000 --> 00:11:04,174
he made us realize the importance

248
00:11:04,198 --> 00:11:07,197
of what he likes to call
"horizontal segmentation."

249
00:11:08,000 --> 00:11:09,015
Why is this critical?

250
00:11:09,039 --> 00:11:12,737
Because this is the way the food industry
thought before Howard.

251
00:11:12,761 --> 00:11:15,071
What were they obsessed with
in the early 80s?

252
00:11:15,095 --> 00:11:16,635
They were obsessed with mustard.

253
00:11:16,659 --> 00:11:19,976
In particular, they were obsessed
with the story of Grey Poupon.

254
00:11:20,000 --> 00:11:23,201
Used to be, there were two mustards:
French's and Gulden's.

255
00:11:23,225 --> 00:11:24,718
What were they? Yellow mustard.

256
00:11:24,742 --> 00:11:25,757
What's in it?

257
00:11:25,781 --> 00:11:27,835
Yellow mustard seeds,
turmeric, and paprika.

258
00:11:27,859 --> 00:11:28,933
That was mustard.

259
00:11:28,957 --> 00:11:31,482
Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon.

260
00:11:31,506 --> 00:11:32,694
Right?

261
00:11:32,718 --> 00:11:38,381
Much more volatile brown mustard seed,
some white wine, a nose hit,

262
00:11:38,405 --> 00:11:40,343
much more delicate aromatics.

263
00:11:40,367 --> 00:11:41,382
And what do they do?

264
00:11:41,406 --> 00:11:46,205
They put it in a little tiny glass jar,
with a wonderful enameled label on it,

265
00:11:46,229 --> 00:11:47,303
made it look French,

266
00:11:47,327 --> 00:11:49,428
even though it's made
in Oxnard, California.

267
00:11:49,452 --> 00:11:50,453
(Laughter)

268
00:11:50,477 --> 00:11:54,976
And instead of charging a dollar fifty
for the eight-ounce bottle,

269
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the way that French's and Gulden's did,

270
00:11:56,997 --> 00:11:58,724
they decided to charge four dollars.

271
00:11:58,748 --> 00:11:59,960
And they had those ads.

272
00:11:59,984 --> 00:12:02,619
With the guy in the Rolls Royce,
eating the Grey Poupon.

273
00:12:02,643 --> 00:12:05,429
Another pulls up, and says,
"Do you have any Grey Poupon?"

274
00:12:05,453 --> 00:12:08,637
And the whole thing, after they did that,
Grey Poupon takes off!

275
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Takes over the mustard business!

276
00:12:10,209 --> 00:12:12,217
And everyone's take-home lesson from that

277
00:12:12,241 --> 00:12:16,976
was that the way to make people happy

278
00:12:17,000 --> 00:12:20,394
is to give them something
that is more expensive,

279
00:12:20,418 --> 00:12:22,485
something to aspire to.

280
00:12:22,509 --> 00:12:26,652
It's to make them turn their back
on what they think they like now,

281
00:12:26,676 --> 00:12:30,095
and reach out for something
higher up the mustard hierarchy.

282
00:12:30,119 --> 00:12:31,120
(Laughter)

283
00:12:31,144 --> 00:12:33,356
A better mustard!
A more expensive mustard!

284
00:12:33,380 --> 00:12:36,543
A mustard of more sophistication
and culture and meaning.

285
00:12:36,567 --> 00:12:38,976
And Howard looked to that
and said, "That's wrong!"

286
00:12:39,639 --> 00:12:41,757
Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy.

287
00:12:42,218 --> 00:12:46,319
Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce,
on a horizontal plane.

288
00:12:46,779 --> 00:12:49,518
There is no good mustard or bad mustard.

289
00:12:49,542 --> 00:12:52,068
There is no perfect mustard
or imperfect mustard.

290
00:12:52,092 --> 00:12:55,837
There are only different kinds of mustards
that suit different kinds of people.

291
00:12:56,358 --> 00:13:01,193
He fundamentally democratized
the way we think about taste.

292
00:13:01,217 --> 00:13:05,436
And for that, as well, we owe
Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks.

293
00:13:06,201 --> 00:13:09,694
Third thing that Howard did,
and perhaps the most important,

294
00:13:09,718 --> 00:13:12,557
is Howard confronted the notion
of the Platonic dish.

295
00:13:12,581 --> 00:13:13,582
(Laughter)

296
00:13:13,606 --> 00:13:14,748
What do I mean by that?

297
00:13:14,772 --> 00:13:16,328
(Laughter)

298
00:13:16,352 --> 00:13:18,452
For the longest time in the food industry,

299
00:13:18,476 --> 00:13:21,056
there was a sense that there was one way,

300
00:13:21,080 --> 00:13:23,808
a perfect way, to make a dish.

301
00:13:24,570 --> 00:13:26,285
You go to Chez Panisse,

302
00:13:26,309 --> 00:13:31,592
they give you the red-tail sashimi
with roasted pumpkin seeds

303
00:13:31,616 --> 00:13:33,469
in a something something reduction.

304
00:13:33,493 --> 00:13:35,976
They don't give you five options
on the reduction.

305
00:13:36,000 --> 00:13:39,594
They don't say, "Do you want
the extra-chunky reduction, or ...?"

306
00:13:39,618 --> 00:13:40,626
No!

307
00:13:40,650 --> 00:13:42,197
You just get the reduction. Why?

308
00:13:42,221 --> 00:13:43,783
Because the chef at Chez Panisse

309
00:13:43,807 --> 00:13:46,395
has a Platonic notion
about red-tail sashimi.

310
00:13:46,419 --> 00:13:48,301
"This is the way it ought to be."

311
00:13:48,920 --> 00:13:52,976
And she serves it that way
time and time again,

312
00:13:53,000 --> 00:13:55,262
and if you quarrel with her, she will say,

313
00:13:55,286 --> 00:13:56,888
"You know what? You're wrong!

314
00:13:57,468 --> 00:14:00,188
This is the best way it ought to be
in this restaurant."

315
00:14:00,212 --> 00:14:03,651
Now that same idea fueled
the commercial food industry as well.

316
00:14:04,294 --> 00:14:07,511
They had a Platonic notion
of what tomato sauce was.

317
00:14:07,535 --> 00:14:09,976
And where did that come from?
It came from Italy.

318
00:14:10,000 --> 00:14:12,019
Italian tomato sauce is what?

319
00:14:12,375 --> 00:14:13,975
It's blended; it's thin.

320
00:14:14,531 --> 00:14:16,840
The culture of tomato sauce was thin.

321
00:14:16,864 --> 00:14:19,841
When we talked about "authentic
tomato sauce" in the 1970s,

322
00:14:19,865 --> 00:14:21,674
we talked about Italian tomato sauce,

323
00:14:21,698 --> 00:14:23,477
we talked about the earliest Ragùs,

324
00:14:23,501 --> 00:14:25,653
which had no visible solids, right?

325
00:14:26,000 --> 00:14:28,117
Which were thin, you just put a little bit

326
00:14:28,141 --> 00:14:30,189
and it sunk down to the bottom
of the pasta.

327
00:14:30,213 --> 00:14:31,405
That's what it was.

328
00:14:31,429 --> 00:14:33,090
And why were we attached to that?

329
00:14:33,114 --> 00:14:35,852
Because we thought
that what it took to make people happy

330
00:14:35,876 --> 00:14:40,470
was to provide them with the most
culturally authentic tomato sauce, A.

331
00:14:40,494 --> 00:14:45,578
And B, we thought that if we gave them
the culturally authentic tomato sauce,

332
00:14:45,602 --> 00:14:47,030
then they would embrace it.

333
00:14:47,054 --> 00:14:49,788
And that's what would please
the maximum number of people.

334
00:14:50,288 --> 00:14:52,574
In other words,

335
00:14:52,598 --> 00:14:55,997
people in the cooking world
were looking for cooking universals.

336
00:14:56,336 --> 00:14:58,774
They were looking for one way
to treat all of us.

337
00:14:58,798 --> 00:15:01,378
And it's good reason for them
to be obsessed

338
00:15:01,402 --> 00:15:02,784
with the idea of universals,

339
00:15:02,808 --> 00:15:04,205
because all of science,

340
00:15:04,229 --> 00:15:06,478
through the 19th century
and much of the 20th,

341
00:15:06,502 --> 00:15:08,171
was obsessed with universals.

342
00:15:08,195 --> 00:15:12,183
Psychologists, medical scientists,
economists

343
00:15:12,207 --> 00:15:14,295
were all interested
in finding out the rules

344
00:15:14,319 --> 00:15:16,509
that govern the way all of us behave.

345
00:15:17,259 --> 00:15:18,657
But that changed, right?

346
00:15:18,681 --> 00:15:22,292
What is the great revolution
in science of the last 10, 15 years?

347
00:15:22,316 --> 00:15:25,831
It is the movement
from the search for universals

348
00:15:25,855 --> 00:15:27,704
to the understanding of variability.

349
00:15:28,339 --> 00:15:31,976
Now in medical science,
we don't want to know, necessarily,

350
00:15:32,000 --> 00:15:33,701
just how cancer works,

351
00:15:33,725 --> 00:15:36,976
we want to know how your cancer
is different from my cancer.

352
00:15:37,000 --> 00:15:39,747
I guess my cancer different
from your cancer.

353
00:15:39,771 --> 00:15:43,859
Genetics has opened the door
to the study of human variability.

354
00:15:43,883 --> 00:15:45,978
What Howard Moskowitz
was doing was saying,

355
00:15:46,002 --> 00:15:50,113
"This same revolution needs to happen
in the world of tomato sauce."

356
00:15:51,000 --> 00:15:53,572
And for that, we owe him
a great vote of thanks.

357
00:15:55,201 --> 00:15:58,043
I'll give you one last
illustration of variability,

358
00:15:58,067 --> 00:15:59,908
and that is -- oh, I'm sorry.

359
00:15:59,932 --> 00:16:03,420
Howard not only believed that,
but he took it a second step,

360
00:16:03,444 --> 00:16:08,596
which was to say that when we pursue
universal principles in food,

361
00:16:08,620 --> 00:16:10,240
we aren't just making an error;

362
00:16:10,264 --> 00:16:13,612
we are actually doing ourselves
a massive disservice.

363
00:16:14,000 --> 00:16:15,810
And the example he used was coffee.

364
00:16:16,223 --> 00:16:20,268
And coffee is something he did
a lot of work with, with Nescafé.

365
00:16:20,746 --> 00:16:24,244
If I were to ask all of you to try
and come up with a brand of coffee --

366
00:16:24,268 --> 00:16:27,290
a type of coffee, a brew --
that made all of you happy,

367
00:16:27,314 --> 00:16:29,267
and then I asked you to rate that coffee,

368
00:16:29,291 --> 00:16:33,348
the average score in this room for coffee
would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100.

369
00:16:33,825 --> 00:16:37,448
If, however, you allowed me
to break you into coffee clusters,

370
00:16:37,472 --> 00:16:39,257
maybe three or four coffee clusters,

371
00:16:39,281 --> 00:16:43,976
and I could make coffee just
for each of those individual clusters,

372
00:16:44,000 --> 00:16:47,555
your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78.

373
00:16:48,000 --> 00:16:53,237
The difference between coffee
at 60 and coffee at 78

374
00:16:53,261 --> 00:16:55,976
is a difference between coffee
that makes you wince,

375
00:16:56,000 --> 00:16:59,004
and coffee that makes you
deliriously happy.

376
00:16:59,690 --> 00:17:02,884
That is the final, and I think
most beautiful lesson,

377
00:17:02,908 --> 00:17:04,243
of Howard Moskowitz:

378
00:17:04,267 --> 00:17:07,976
that in embracing the diversity
of human beings,

379
00:17:08,000 --> 00:17:10,365
we will find a surer way
to true happiness.

380
00:17:10,769 --> 00:17:11,786
Thank you.

381
00:17:11,810 --> 00:17:12,976
(Applause)