snap judgments and first impressions. And it comes out in January, and I hope you all

buy it in triplicate. But I was thinking about this, and I realized that although my new

book makes me happy, and I think would make my mother happy, it's not really about happiness.

So I decided instead, I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans

happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years. A man who is a great personal hero of mine.

Someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce.

Howard's about this high, and he's round, and he's in his sixties, and he has big huge

glasses and thinning grey hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality,

and he has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he's a great aficionado of medieval history.

And by profession, he's a psychophysicist. Now, I should tell you that I have no idea

what psychophysics is, although at some point in my life, I dated a girl for two years who

was getting her doctorate in psychophysics. Which should tell you something about that

relationship. (Laughter) As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring

things. And Howard is very interested in measuring things. And he graduated with his doctorate

from Harvard, and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains, New York. And one of

his first clients was -- this is many years ago, back in the early '70s -- one of his

first clients was Pepsi. And Pepsi came to Howard and they said, "You know, there's this

new thing called aspartame, and we would like to make Diet Pepsi. We'd like you to figure

out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi, in order to have the perfect

drink." Right? Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer, and that's

what Howard thought. Because Pepsi told him, "Look, we're working with a band between eight

and 12 percent. Anything below eight percent sweetness is not sweet enough, anything above

12 percent sweetness is too sweet. We want to know, what's the sweet spot between eight

and 12?" Now, if I gave you this problem to do, you would all say, it's very simple. What

we do, is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi, at every degree of sweetness -- eight

percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, all the way up to 12 -- and we try this out with thousands of

people, and we plot the results on a curve, and we take the most popular concentration.

Right? Really simple. Howard does the experiment, and he gets the

data back, and he plots it on a curve, and all of a sudden he realizes it's not a nice

bell curve. In fact, the data doesn't make any sense. It's a mess. It's all over the

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

not dismayed when the data comes back a mess. They think, well, you know, figuring out what

people think about cola's not that easy. You know, maybe we made an error somewhere along

the way. You know, let's just make an educated guess, and they simply point and they go for

10 percent, right in the middle. Howard is not so easily placated. Howard is a man of

a certain degree of intellectual standards. And this was not good enough for him, and

this question bedeviled him for years. And he would think it through and say, what was

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

And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains, about to go trying to dream

up some work for NescafE. And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him.

And that is, that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data, they were asking the wrong question.

They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect

Pepsis. Trust me. This was an enormous revelation. This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs

in all of food science. And Howard immediately went on the road, and he would go to conferences

around the country, would stand up and he would say, "You had been looking for the perfect

Pepsi. You're wrong. You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis." And people would

look at him with a blank look, and they would say, "What are you talking about? This is

craziness." And they would say, you know, "Move! Next!" Tried to get business, nobody

would hire him -- he was obsessed, though, and he talked about it and talked about it

and talked about it. Howard loves the Yiddish expression "to a worm in horseradish, the

world is horseradish." This was his horseradish. (Laughter) He was obsessed with it!

And finally, he had a breakthrough. Vlasic Pickles came to him, and they said, "Mr. Moskowitz

-- Doctor Moskowitz -- we want to make the perfect pickle." And he said, "There is no

perfect pickle, there are only perfect pickles." And he came back to them and he said, "You

don't just need to improve your regular, you need to create zesty." And that's where we

got zesty pickles. Then the next person came to him, and that was Campbell's Soup. And

this was even more important. In fact, Campbell's Soup is where Howard made his reputation.

Campbell's made Prego, and Prego, in the early '80s, was struggling next to Ragu, which was

the dominant spaghetti sauce of the '70s and '80s. Now in the industry -- I don't know

whether you care about this, or how much time I have to go into this. But it was, technically

speaking -- this is an aside -- Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragu. The quality

of the tomato paste is much better, the spice mix is far superior, it adheres to the pasta

in a much more pleasing way. In fact, they would do the famous bowl test back in the

'70s with Ragu and Prego. You'd have a plate of spaghetti, and you would pour it on, right?

And the Ragu would all go to the bottom, and the Prego would sit on top. That's called

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

and the quality of their tomato paste, Prego was struggling.

So they came to Howard, and they said, fix us. And Howard looked at their product line,

and he said, what you have is a dead tomato society. So he said, this is what I want to

do. And he got together with the Campbell's soup kitchen, and he made 45 varieties of

spaghetti sauce. And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary

tomato sauce. By sweetness, by level of garlic, by tartness, by sourness, by tomatoey-ness,

by visible solids -- my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business. (Laughter) Every

conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce. And then he took

this whole raft of 45 spaghetti sauces, and he went on the road. He went to New York,

he went to Chicago, he went to Jacksonville, he went to Los Angeles. And he brought in

people by the truckload. Into big halls. And he sat them down for two hours, and he gave

them, over the course of that two hours, ten bowls. Ten small bowls of pasta, with a different

spaghetti sauce on each one. And after they ate each bowl, they had to rate, from 0 to

100, how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was.

At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, he had a mountain of

data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. And then he analyzed the

data. Now, did he look for the most popular brand variety of spaghetti sauce? No! Howard

doesn't believe that there is such a thing. Instead, he looked at the data, and he said,

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

congregate around certain ideas. And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all

this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three

groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain, there are people who like their

spaghetti sauce spicy and there are people who like it extra chunky.

And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant. Because at the time,

in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti

sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, "You telling me that one third of Americans

crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs?" And he said

yes! (Laughter) And Prego then went back, and completely reformulated their spaghetti

sauce, and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over

the spaghetti sauce business in this country. And over the next 10 years, they made 600

million dollars off their line of extra-chunky sauces.

And everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, "Oh my

god! We've been thinking all wrong!" And that's when you started getting seven different kinds

of vinegar, and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil -- and

then eventually even Ragu hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragu that

he did for Prego. And today, if you go to the supermarket, a really good one, and you

look at how many Ragus there are -- Do you know how many they are? 36! In six varieties:

Cheese, Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional, Extra-Chunky Garden. (Laughter)

That's Howard's doing. That is Howard's gift to the American people.

Now why is that important? It is, in fact, enormously important. I'll explain to you

why. What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making

you happy. Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out

what people want to eat -- what will make people happy -- is to ask them. And for years

and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit

all you people down, and they would say, "What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us

what you want in a spaghetti sauce." And for all those years -- 20, 30 years -- through

all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky. Even though

at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did. (Laughter)

People don't know what they want! Right? As Howard loves to say, "The mind knows not what

the tongue wants." It's a mystery! And a critically important step in understanding our own desires

and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down. If I asked

all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you'd

say? Every one of you would say "I want a dark, rich, hearty roast." It's what people

always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee. What do you like? Dark, rich,

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

to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you. Most of you like milky, weak coffee.

But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want -- that "I want a milky,

weak coffee." (Laughter) So that's number one thing that Howard did.

Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize -- it's another very critical point

-- he made us realize in the importance of what he likes to call horizontal segmentation.

Why is this critical? It's critical because this is the way the food industry thought

before Howard. Right? What were they obsessed with in the early '80s? They were obsessed

with mustard. In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon. Right? Used

to be, there were two mustards. French's and Gulden's. What were they? Yellow mustard.

What's in yellow mustard? Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. That was mustard. Grey

Poupon came along, with a Dijon. Right? Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white

wine, a nose hit, much more delicate aromatics. And what do they do? They put it in a little

tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it, made it look French, even though

it's made in Oxnard, California. And instead of charging a dollar-fifty for the eight-ounce

bottle, the way the French's and Gulden's did, they decided to charge four dollars.

And then they had those ads, right? With the guy in the Rolls Royce, and he's eating the

Grey Poupon, the other Rolls Royce pulls up, and he says, do you have any Grey Poupon?

And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off! Takes over the mustard

business! And everyone's take-home lesson from that

was that the way to get to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive,

something to aspire to. Right? It's to make them turn their back on what they think they

like now, and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy. A better mustard!

A more expensive mustard! A mustard of more sophistication and culture and meaning. And

Howard looked to that and said, that's wrong! Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard

exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard, or bad mustard.

There is no perfect mustard, or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of

mustards that suit different kinds of people. He fundamentally democratized the way we think

about taste. And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks.

Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important, is Howard confronted the notion

of the Platonic dish. (Laughter) What do I mean by that? For the longest time in the

food industry, there was a sense that there was one way, a perfect way, to make a dish.

You go to Chez Panisse, they give you the red-tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds

in a something something reduction. They don't give you five options on the reduction, right?

They don't say, do you want the extra-chunky reduction, or do you want the -- no! You just

get the reduction. Why? Because the chef at Chez Panisse has a Platonic notion about red-tail

sashimi. This is the way it ought to be. And she serves it that way time and time again,

and if you quarrel with her, she will say, "You know what? You're wrong! This is the

best way it ought to be in this restaurant." Now that same idea fueled the commercial food

industry as well. They had a notion, a Platonic notion, of what tomato sauce was. And where

did that come from? It came from Italy. Italian tomato sauce is what? It's blended, it's thin.

The culture of tomato sauce was thin. When we talked about authentic tomato sauce in

the 1970s, we talked about Italian tomato sauce. We talked about the earliest ragus.

Which had no visible solids, right? Which were thin, and you just put a little bit over

it and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. That's what it was. And why were we attached