Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce
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0:00 - 0:03I think I was supposed to talk about my new book,
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0:03 - 0:08which is called "Blink," and it's about snap judgments and first impressions.
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0:08 - 0:12And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate.
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0:12 - 0:15But I was thinking about this,
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0:15 - 0:18and I realized that although my new book makes me happy,
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0:18 - 0:22and I think would make my mother happy,
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0:22 - 0:24it's not really about happiness.
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0:24 - 0:28So I decided instead, I would talk about someone who
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0:28 - 0:31I think has done as much to make Americans happy
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0:31 - 0:35as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years,
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0:35 - 0:38a man who is a great personal hero of mine:
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0:38 - 0:41someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz,
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0:41 - 0:45who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce.
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0:45 - 0:50Howard's about this high, and he's round,
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0:50 - 0:54and he's in his 60s, and he has big huge glasses
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0:54 - 1:00and thinning grey hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality,
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1:00 - 1:04and he has a parrot, and he loves the opera,
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1:04 - 1:08and he's a great aficionado of medieval history.
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1:08 - 1:11And by profession, he's a psychophysicist.
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1:11 - 1:15Now, I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is,
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1:15 - 1:19although at some point in my life, I dated a girl for two years who was getting
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1:19 - 1:21her doctorate in psychophysics.
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1:21 - 1:27Which should tell you something about that relationship. (Laughter)
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1:27 - 1:30As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring things.
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1:30 - 1:32And Howard is very interested in measuring things.
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1:32 - 1:34And he graduated with his doctorate from Harvard,
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1:34 - 1:38and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains, New York.
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1:38 - 1:43And one of his first clients was -- this is many years ago, back in the early '70s
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1:43 - 1:45-- one of his first clients was Pepsi.
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1:45 - 1:47And Pepsi came to Howard and they said,
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1:47 - 1:49"You know, there's this new thing called aspartame,
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1:49 - 1:52and we would like to make Diet Pepsi.
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1:52 - 1:55We'd like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in
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1:55 - 2:00each can of Diet Pepsi, in order to have the perfect drink." Right?
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2:00 - 2:04Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer,
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2:04 - 2:06and that's what Howard thought. Because Pepsi told him,
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2:06 - 2:09"Look, we're working with a band between eight and 12 percent.
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2:09 - 2:12Anything below eight percent sweetness is not sweet enough;
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2:12 - 2:16anything above 12 percent sweetness is too sweet.
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2:16 - 2:20We want to know: what's the sweet spot between eight and 12?"
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2:20 - 2:23Now, if I gave you this problem to do, you would all say, it's very simple.
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2:23 - 2:27What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi,
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2:27 - 2:31at every degree of sweetness -- eight percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3,
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2:31 - 2:35all the way up to 12 -- and we try this out with thousands of people,
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2:35 - 2:38and we plot the results on a curve,
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2:38 - 2:42and we take the most popular concentration. Right? Really simple.
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2:42 - 2:45Howard does the experiment, and he gets the data back, and he plots it on a curve,
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2:45 - 2:49and all of a sudden he realizes it's not a nice bell curve.
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2:49 - 2:50In fact, the data doesn't make any sense.
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2:50 - 2:53It's a mess. It's all over the place.
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2:53 - 2:58Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such,
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2:58 - 3:01are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess.
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3:01 - 3:05They think, well, you know, figuring out what people think about cola's not that easy.
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3:05 - 3:07You know, maybe we made an error somewhere along the way.
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3:07 - 3:10You know, let's just make an educated guess,
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3:10 - 3:14and they simply point and they go for 10 percent, right in the middle.
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3:14 - 3:16Howard is not so easily placated.
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3:16 - 3:19Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards.
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3:19 - 3:21And this was not good enough for him,
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3:21 - 3:23and this question bedeviled him for years.
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3:23 - 3:26And he would think it through and say, what was wrong?
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3:26 - 3:30Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi?
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3:30 - 3:33And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains,
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3:33 - 3:36about to go trying to dream up some work for Nescafe.
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3:36 - 3:40And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him.
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3:40 - 3:43And that is, that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data,
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3:43 - 3:45they were asking the wrong question.
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3:45 - 3:47They were looking for the perfect Pepsi,
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3:47 - 3:52and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis. Trust me.
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3:52 - 3:54This was an enormous revelation.
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3:54 - 3:57This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science.
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3:57 - 3:59And Howard immediately went on the road,
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3:59 - 4:01and he would go to conferences around the country,
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4:01 - 4:03and he would stand up and he would say,
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4:03 - 4:07"You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi. You're wrong.
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4:07 - 4:10You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis."
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4:10 - 4:12And people would look at him with a blank look, and they would say,
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4:12 - 4:14"What are you talking about? This is craziness."
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4:14 - 4:16And they would say, you know, "Move! Next!"
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4:16 - 4:19Tried to get business, nobody would hire him -- he was obsessed, though,
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4:19 - 4:22and he talked about it and talked about it and talked about it.
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4:22 - 4:23Howard loves the Yiddish expression
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4:23 - 4:26"To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish."
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4:26 - 4:32This was his horseradish. (Laughter) He was obsessed with it!
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4:32 - 4:37And finally, he had a breakthrough. Vlasic Pickles came to him,
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4:37 - 4:40and they said, "Mr. Moskowitz -- Doctor Moskowitz --
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4:40 - 4:42we want to make the perfect pickle." And he said,
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4:42 - 4:46"There is no perfect pickle; there are only perfect pickles."
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4:46 - 4:50And he came back to them and he said, "You don't just need to improve your regular;
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4:50 - 4:52you need to create zesty."
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4:52 - 4:55And that's where we got zesty pickles.
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4:55 - 4:57Then the next person came to him, and that was Campbell's Soup.
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4:57 - 4:59And this was even more important. In fact,
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4:59 - 5:03Campbell's Soup is where Howard made his reputation.
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5:03 - 5:08Campbell's made Prego, and Prego, in the early '80s, was struggling next to Ragu,
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5:08 - 5:11which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the '70s and '80s.
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5:11 - 5:14Now in the industry -- I don't know whether you care about this,
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5:14 - 5:15or how much time I have to go into this.
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5:15 - 5:18But it was, technically speaking -- this is an aside --
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5:18 - 5:21Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragu.
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5:21 - 5:25The quality of the tomato paste is much better; the spice mix is far superior;
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5:25 - 5:28it adheres to the pasta in a much more pleasing way. In fact,
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5:28 - 5:33they would do the famous bowl test back in the '70s with Ragu and Prego.
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5:33 - 5:36You'd have a plate of spaghetti, and you would pour it on, right?
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5:36 - 5:41And the Ragu would all go to the bottom, and the Prego would sit on top.
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5:41 - 5:43That's called "adherence."
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5:43 - 5:47And, anyway, despite the fact that they were far superior in adherence,
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5:47 - 5:52and the quality of their tomato paste, Prego was struggling.
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5:52 - 5:55So they came to Howard, and they said, fix us.
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5:55 - 5:57And Howard looked at their product line, and he said,
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5:57 - 6:01what you have is a dead tomato society.
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6:01 - 6:03So he said, this is what I want to do.
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6:03 - 6:05And he got together with the Campbell's soup kitchen,
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6:05 - 6:10and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. And he varied them
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6:10 - 6:14according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce:
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6:14 - 6:18by sweetness, by level of garlic, by tartness, by sourness, by tomatoey-ness,
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6:18 - 6:25by visible solids -- my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business. (Laughter)
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6:25 - 6:30Every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce.
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6:30 - 6:35And then he took this whole raft of 45 spaghetti sauces, and he went on the road.
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6:35 - 6:37He went to New York; he went to Chicago; he went to Jacksonville;
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6:37 - 6:43he went to Los Angeles. And he brought in people by the truckload. Into big halls.
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6:43 - 6:45And he sat them down for two hours, and he gave them,
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6:45 - 6:48over the course of that two hours, ten bowls.
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6:48 - 6:52Ten small bowls of pasta, with a different spaghetti sauce on each one.
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6:52 - 6:56And after they ate each bowl, they had to rate, from 0 to 100,
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6:56 - 6:59how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was.
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6:59 - 7:02At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months,
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7:02 - 7:04he had a mountain of data
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7:04 - 7:08about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce.
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7:08 - 7:10And then he analyzed the data.
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7:10 - 7:14Now, did he look for the most popular brand variety of spaghetti sauce? No!
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7:14 - 7:16Howard doesn't believe that there is such a thing.
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7:16 - 7:18Instead, he looked at the data, and he said,
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7:18 - 7:24let's see if we can group all these different data points into clusters.
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7:24 - 7:27Let's see if they congregate around certain ideas.
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7:27 - 7:33And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce,
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7:33 - 7:36you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups.
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7:36 - 7:39There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain;
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7:39 - 7:42there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy;
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7:42 - 7:45and there are people who like it extra chunky.
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7:45 - 7:49And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant,
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7:49 - 7:51because at the time, in the early 1980s,
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7:51 - 7:53if you went to a supermarket,
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7:53 - 7:57you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce.
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7:57 - 7:59And Prego turned to Howard, and they said,
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7:59 - 8:05"You telling me that one third of Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce
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8:05 - 8:09and yet no one is servicing their needs?" And he said yes!
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8:09 - 8:11(Laughter) And Prego then went back,
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8:11 - 8:13and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce,
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8:13 - 8:17and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely
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8:17 - 8:20took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country.
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8:20 - 8:24And over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars
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8:24 - 8:28off their line of extra-chunky sauces.
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8:28 - 8:31And everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said,
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8:31 - 8:34"Oh my god! We've been thinking all wrong!"
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8:34 - 8:37And that's when you started to get seven different kinds of vinegar,
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8:37 - 8:42and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil --
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8:42 - 8:46and then eventually even Ragu hired Howard,
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8:46 - 8:49and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragu that he did for Prego.
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8:49 - 8:50And today, if you go to the supermarket, a really good one,
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8:50 - 8:53and you look at how many Ragus there are --
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8:53 - 8:56do you know how many they are? 36!
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8:56 - 9:02In six varieties: Cheese, Light, Robusto,
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9:02 - 9:11Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional, Extra-Chunky Garden. (Laughter)
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9:11 - 9:15That's Howard's doing. That is Howard's gift to the American people.
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9:15 - 9:19Now why is that important?
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9:19 - 9:23It is, in fact, enormously important. I'll explain to you why.
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9:23 - 9:26What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks
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9:26 - 9:29about making you happy.
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9:29 - 9:32Assumption number one in the food industry used to be
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9:32 - 9:35that the way to find out what people want to eat --
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9:35 - 9:38what will make people happy -- is to ask them.
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9:38 - 9:40And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have
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9:40 - 9:44focus groups, and they would sit all you people down, and they would say,
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9:44 - 9:48"What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce."
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9:48 - 9:51And for all those years -- 20, 30 years --
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9:51 - 9:53through all those focus group sessions,
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9:53 - 9:57no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky.
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9:57 - 10:00Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did.
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10:00 - 10:03(Laughter)
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10:03 - 10:05People don't know what they want! Right?
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10:05 - 10:08As Howard loves to say, "The mind knows not what the tongue wants."
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10:08 - 10:11It's a mystery!
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10:11 - 10:16And a critically important step in understanding our own desires
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10:16 - 10:21and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down.
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10:21 - 10:25If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee,
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10:25 - 10:31you know what you'd say? Every one of you would say, "I want a dark, rich, hearty roast."
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10:31 - 10:33It's what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee.
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10:33 - 10:36What do you like? Dark, rich, hearty roast!
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10:36 - 10:40What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast?
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10:40 - 10:43According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you.
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10:43 - 10:47Most of you like milky, weak coffee.
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10:47 - 10:50But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want
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10:50 - 10:52that "I want a milky, weak coffee." (Laughter)
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10:52 - 10:57So that's number one thing that Howard did.
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10:57 - 11:00Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize --
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11:00 - 11:02it's another very critical point --
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11:02 - 11:08he made us realize in the importance of what he likes to call "horizontal segmentation."
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11:08 - 11:10Why is this critical? It's critical because
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11:10 - 11:12this is the way the food industry thought before Howard. Right?
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11:12 - 11:17What were they obsessed with in the early '80s? They were obsessed with mustard.
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11:17 - 11:20In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon. Right?
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11:20 - 11:23Used to be, there were two mustards. French's and Gulden's.
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11:23 - 11:25What were they? Yellow mustard. What's in yellow mustard?
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11:25 - 11:29Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. That was mustard.
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11:29 - 11:32Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon. Right?
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11:32 - 11:38Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white wine, a nose hit,
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11:38 - 11:41much more delicate aromatics. And what do they do?
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11:41 - 11:46They put it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it,
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11:46 - 11:50made it look French, even though it's made in Oxnard, California.
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11:50 - 11:55And instead of charging a dollar-fifty for the eight-ounce bottle,
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11:55 - 11:58the way that French's and Gulden's did, they decided to charge four dollars.
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11:58 - 12:01And then they had those ads, right? With the guy in the Rolls Royce,
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12:01 - 12:03and he's eating the Grey Poupon. The other Rolls Royce pulls up,
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12:03 - 12:05and he says, do you have any Grey Poupon?
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12:05 - 12:08And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off!
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12:08 - 12:10Takes over the mustard business!
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12:10 - 12:13And everyone's take-home lesson from that was
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12:13 - 12:17that the way to get to make people happy
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12:17 - 12:22is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. Right?
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12:22 - 12:27It's to make them turn their back on what they think they like now,
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12:27 - 12:31and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy.
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12:31 - 12:33A better mustard! A more expensive mustard!
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12:33 - 12:36A mustard of more sophistication and culture and meaning.
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12:36 - 12:39And Howard looked to that and said, that's wrong!
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12:39 - 12:42Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy.
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12:42 - 12:47Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane.
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12:47 - 12:50There is no good mustard or bad mustard.
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12:50 - 12:52There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard.
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12:52 - 12:56There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people.
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12:56 - 13:01He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste.
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13:01 - 13:06And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks.
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13:06 - 13:10Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important,
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13:10 - 13:13is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish. (Laughter)
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13:13 - 13:16What do I mean by that?
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13:16 - 13:18For the longest time in the food industry,
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13:18 - 13:25there was a sense that there was one way, a perfect way, to make a dish.
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13:25 - 13:29You go to Chez Panisse, they give you the red-tail sashimi
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13:29 - 13:33with roasted pumpkin seeds in a something something reduction.
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13:33 - 13:36They don't give you five options on the reduction, right?
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13:36 - 13:40They don't say, do you want the extra-chunky reduction, or do you want the -- no!
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13:40 - 13:43You just get the reduction. Why? Because the chef at Chez Panisse
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13:43 - 13:46has a Platonic notion about red-tail sashimi.
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13:46 - 13:49This is the way it ought to be.
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13:49 - 13:53And she serves it that way time and time again,
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13:53 - 13:55and if you quarrel with her, she will say,
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13:55 - 14:00"You know what? You're wrong! This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant."
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14:00 - 14:04Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well.
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14:04 - 14:07They had a notion, a Platonic notion, of what tomato sauce was.
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14:07 - 14:10And where did that come from? It came from Italy.
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14:10 - 14:14Italian tomato sauce is what? It's blended; it's thin.
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14:14 - 14:17The culture of tomato sauce was thin.
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14:17 - 14:20When we talked about authentic tomato sauce in the 1970s,
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14:20 - 14:23we talked about Italian tomato sauce. We talked about the earliest ragus,
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14:23 - 14:26which had no visible solids, right?
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14:26 - 14:28Which were thin, and you just put a little bit over it
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14:28 - 14:30and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta.
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14:30 - 14:32That's what it was. And why were we attached to that?
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14:32 - 14:35Because we thought that what it took to make people happy
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14:35 - 14:41was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce, A;
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14:41 - 14:45and B, we thought that if we gave them the culturally authentic tomato sauce,
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14:45 - 14:47then they would embrace it.
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14:47 - 14:50And that's what would please the maximum number of people.
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14:50 - 14:52And the reason we thought that -- in other words,
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14:52 - 14:56people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals.
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14:56 - 14:59They were looking for one way to treat all of us.
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14:59 - 15:02And it's good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals,
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15:02 - 15:06because all of science, through the 19th century and much of the 20th,
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15:06 - 15:08was obsessed with universals.
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15:08 - 15:14Psychologists, medical scientists, economists were all interested in finding out
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15:14 - 15:17the rules that govern the way all of us behave.
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15:17 - 15:19But that changed, right?
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15:19 - 15:22What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years?
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15:22 - 15:28It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability.
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15:28 - 15:32Now in medical science, we don't want to know how necessarily --
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15:32 - 15:37just how cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer.
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15:37 - 15:40I guess my cancer different from your cancer.
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15:40 - 15:44Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability.
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15:44 - 15:47What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying, this same revolution
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15:47 - 15:51needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce.
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15:51 - 15:55And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks.
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15:55 - 16:00I'll give you one last illustration of variability, and that is -- oh, I'm sorry.
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16:00 - 16:03Howard not only believed that, but he took it a second step,
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16:03 - 16:09which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food,
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16:09 - 16:14we aren't just making an error; we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice.
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16:14 - 16:16And the example he used was coffee.
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16:16 - 16:21And coffee is something he did a lot of work with, with Nescafe.
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16:21 - 16:24If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee
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16:24 - 16:27-- a type of coffee, a brew -- that made all of you happy,
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16:27 - 16:29and then I asked you to rate that coffee,
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16:29 - 16:34the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100.
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16:34 - 16:37If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters,
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16:37 - 16:39maybe three or four coffee clusters,
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16:39 - 16:44and I could make coffee just for each of those individual clusters,
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16:44 - 16:48your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78.
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16:48 - 16:53The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78
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16:53 - 16:56is a difference between coffee that makes you wince,
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16:56 - 17:00and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.
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17:00 - 17:04That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz:
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17:04 - 17:08that in embracing the diversity of human beings,
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17:08 - 17:11we will find a surer way to true happiness.
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17:11 - 17:13Thank you.
- Title:
- Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce
- Speaker:
- Malcolm Gladwell
- Description:
-
Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry's pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce -- and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
closed TED
- Project:
- TEDTalks
- Duration:
- 17:13
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TED added a translation |
Krystian Aparta
The English transcript was updated on 3/23/2015.