What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

Gladwell charts the evolution of Ron Popeil’s Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ and QVC-channel appearances, beginning with his grandfather, Nathan Morris, a pitchman in 1880s New Jersey who traveled the Atlantic coast selling kitchen gadgets. Morris’s trade became a family business, with his nephew Samuel Jacob Popeil acting as his apprentice and inventing kitchen gadgets such as the Dial-O-Matic and the Chop-O-Matic. The Morris-Popeil clan are all extremely attractive and charismatic and use this as part of their sales pitch. However, the secret to their success was their focus on product development and marketing in tandem, as “the object that sold best was the one that sold itself” (4).

Ron Popeil began his career early, at age 13, when he pitched his father’s gadgets at the Maxwell Street flea market in Chicago before doing the county-fair circuit and advertising at Woolworth’s. Ron has obsessively invented kitchen gadgets over the past 30 years, including the chicken rotisserie oven that appeared in a 28-minute, 30-second infomercial on Showtime. Knowing that the product must take center stage, Ron opened the infomercial with shots of the meat before moving on to his personal demonstration. Ron continued to work on the quality of his product, ensuring that he determined the perfect speed for cooking chicken so it would reach an optimal shade of brown.

Ron had an unhappy childhood; his mother disappeared, his father was a distant businessman, and he grew up between his violent grandfather’s house and boarding school. Nevertheless, his father was one of his heroes and ended up building the tradition Ron became part of.

This essay sets out to answer why ketchup has stayed the same when mustard and spaghetti sauce come in dozens of varieties.

While French’s mustard once dominated the American supermarket shelves, the founders of the more expensive Grey Poupon lured some of French’s customers away with a taste test. The Heublein Company, which produces Grey Poupon, managed to give their mustard a more continental aura by putting it in a big glass jar with an enameled label. They realized that Americans were willing to pay more for “an air of sophistication and complex aromatics” (33). The success of this venture showed that the boundaries of taste were fluid rather than fixed.

Bostonian Jim Wigon wanted to create a Grey Poupon equivalent in ketchup, a superior-quality take on the Heinz original using high-quality tomato paste and replacing corn syrup with maple syrup. Wigon’s ketchup, World’s Best, sells for three times the price of Heinz in a fancy glass jar. Though he tried several methods to convert consumers from Heinz to his product, none of them worked.

Howard Moskowitz, a professional food taster from White Plains, New York, also tried to explain the one-brand ketchup conundrum. He found that when it came to other products, such as spaghetti sauce, manufacturers had long made the mistake of thinking that there was a perfect, platonic sauce to suit everyone’s tastes. However, working with Campbell’s kitchens to produce a new bestseller, he found that when he employed food tasters there were at least three categories of favorite, including plain, spicy, and extra-chunky. With a process of “sensory segmentation,” a company can corner more of the market (39).

One of the reasons why this did not work with ketchup, a 19th-century concoction that reflected America’s growing tomato obsession, was that Heinz managed to create an inexpensive sauce that was a hard-hitter in terms of the five fundamental tastes, combining sweet, sour, and umami along with salty and bitter. Umami, a lesser-known taste in the West, is a savory flavor that adds body and an impression of thickness. Umami and sweet tastes appeal to even the most infantile of palates, and the use of plastic bottles that a toddler could squeeze only boosted sales further, as young children have a propensity to familiarize novel food with the addition of ketchup.

Edgar Chambers IV, head of the sensory-analysis center at Kansas State University, conducted a comparative assessment of World’s Best and Heinz, employing 17 trained tasters. They scored according to 14 dimensions of flavor and texture, following the food world’s 15-point scale. They found that Heinz and World’s Best differed in amplitude, a term used to describe the blend and ratio of flavors: Heinz scored high in amplitude while World’s Best scored low, being strong in aromatics but lacking the taste-bud-tempting saltiness and sourness. Thus, the fancier ketchup suffered owing to lack of sensorial completeness. Moskowitz concluded that Heinz’s monopoly remained a conundrum, not governed by the rules that applied to mustard and spaghetti sauce.

This essay explores how Nassim Taleb, Wall Street’s chief dissident, turned his belief in the inevitability of things going wrong into a strategy for investment. Taleb’s heroes were people like Victor Niederhoffer—an enormously wealthy money manager in the mid-1990s—who were overly optimistic about their potential for success in all areas of life. While Wall Street at the time would have taught that Niederhoffer’s success was the result of a careful strategy and expertise, Taleb could not shake the feeling that it might be pure luck, and the question of what made someone successful in the financial market irked him, as he could find no easy answers.

This was partly because Taleb remembered the great upheaval that accompanied his childhood in Lebanon, where war turned everything from “paradise to hell” in the space of six months (54). His grandfather, despite being the former deputy prime minister of Lebanon with ample family land, had lived out his old age in relative poverty in Athens. Gladwell contrasts the pessimistic, brooding Taleb with the perkier, more optimistic members of his hedge fund, Empirica Capital, especially his chief trader, Mark Spitznagel.

With Empirica, Taleb decided against pursuing any investment strategy that had a chance of blowing up and bankrupting him. Empirica dealt with selling options and bets on stocks and bonds. This meant low risk for investors and potential spectacular wins for traders in the unlikely event that the stock plummeted. Empirica’s day-to-day thus saw a small possibility of making enormous amounts of money, with zero chance of blowing up and a large chance of losing small amounts of money. This contrasted with the operation of traditional investment firms, which were prone to making money more regularly but also to losing it all. Taleb saw that rather than being motivated by rational decisions, economic strategies were conceived by irrational humans, and therefore stocks could have irregular distributions. Taleb thought that no one could easily predict patterns or preclude disasters and often quoted the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, who said: “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion” (61). Taleb’s entire business model was predicated on what became known as his “black-swan” theory: that random, rare, unpredictable disasters can have disproportionate effects on the market.

He found that he himself became a black swan when he developed throat cancer despite being a relatively young nonsmoker with a risk of one in 100,000 of developing such a disease. Gladwell argues that once you have been a black swan, it is easier to imagine that there will be other astounding exceptions in your life.

In the end, Taleb’s former hero Victor Niederhoffer became bankrupt on October 27, 1997, when the market fell by 8% and all his options buyers called to purchase their stocks back at the original price. Taleb, by contrast, never thought he was invincible and understood that there was no alternative to protecting himself against disaster.

Gladwell argues that hair dye has an important story to tell about life and values in postwar America. He looks at two home hair-dye brands: Clairol’s Nice ‘n Easy and L’Oréal’s Preference.

The success of Clairol’s hair dye was in part due to the marketing acumen of Shirley Polykoff, the daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who dyed her brown hair blond even in the days when only “less respectable” women did so. Upon meeting Polykoff, her future mother-in-law, a strict Orthodox Jewish woman, asked her son, “Does she color her hair? Or doesn’t she?” (76). Initially humiliated, when Polykoff, a junior copywriter, was given the Clairol account to launch their new hair-dye product, she would turn those words into their famous slogan: “Does she or doesn’t she? […] Only her hairdresser knows for sure” (78). The slogan, which ran alongside marketing campaigns that featured middle-class mothers matching their hair to that of their flaxen-haired daughters, aimed to combat the stigma associated with dyeing hair and to promote the view that natural, girl-next-door results could be achieved. Polykoff received letters testifying that she had changed suburban women’s lives. One woman even claimed that her Clairol-blonde hair had turned a reluctant fiancé into a husband. While Polykoff was a shrewd and ambitious businesswoman, she liked to give off the aura of being harmless and domestic, in line with the 1950s housewife ideal. However, being a “faker” was innate to her “because to be Jewish—or Irish or Italian or African-American or, for that matter, a woman of the fifties caught up in the first strain of feminism—was to be compelled to fake it in a thousand small ways, to pass as one thing when, deep inside, [one was] something else” (84). Being able to pass as a member of the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant group that traditionally held the power was part of Polykoff’s process of Americanization.

In 1973, Ilon Specht, a copywriter, began work with L’Oréal, a French company that wanted a share of Clairol’s profits in the American hair-dye market. They believed their product, Preference, was more sophisticated and technologically advanced than Clairol’s and marketed it to the more fashion-forward, urbanized woman who would pay its higher price tag. The resulting slogan, “Because I’m worth it,” became a signature recognized by 71% of American women (87). While the Clairol campaign was voiced by male announcers, in the L’Oréal ones, the woman spoke directly to the consumer, engaging with them personally. Importantly, she was not afraid to stand out, whereas Polykoff’s branding was built on assimilation. The L’Oréal message was more relevant to women’s position at the end of the 1960s. Retrospectively, Polykoff admitted that she wrote the testimonial about the Clairol blonde woman who pushed a reluctant fiancé into setting a wedding date herself.

Gladwell argues that John Rock, one of the inventors of the contraceptive pill, made a fundamental error that saw Pope Paul VI outlawing all forms of artificial birth control in the Humanae Vitae council of 1968. Because Rock was born and raised a Catholic, while many in his religion disagreed with his mission when the Pill launched in 1960, he fought hard to convince Catholic church councils that his invention aligned with their own promotion of natural forms of birth control. The only form of contraception sanctioned by the Catholic Church is the rhythm method, which means that couples should use their knowledge of the menstrual cycle to abstain from sex on days where estrogen is highest and a woman is at her most fertile. After the monthly fertile window, estrogen drops and progesterone dominates, establishing the “pre- and postmenstrual ‘safe’ period” (104). Moreover, when a woman is pregnant, nature’s contraceptive, progestin, prevents the release of other eggs. The Pill mimics this progestin phase, so that ovulation is permanently shut down—virtually eliminating periods. However, Rock, pandering to the Catholic Church’s favoring of natural cycles, prescribed a system of taking the Pill for three weeks followed by a placebo for one, so that women would have a period that resembled their natural menstrual bleeding. This would already work with Pope Pius XII’s 1958 approval of a pill that regulated irregular cycles and had the unintended effect of contraception.

However, what John Rock thought was natural—a 28-day cycle for women of menstruating age—was a phenomenon that had risen in modern Western societies. The late 1980s research of Beverly Strassmann, an anthropologist who lived among the Dogon group in Mali, saw that Indigenous women had extremely different menstrual habits from those expected in the West. She was thus able to draw conclusions about the changes that had taken place in female menarche and ovulation as society became more industrialized. The Dogon women began menstruating at age 16, much later than Americans, and between ages 20 and 34 spent much time pregnant or breastfeeding, a practice that suppresses ovulation. The Dogon woman averages 100 periods in a lifetime, whereas Western women average 350 to 400.

These surges in estrogen among Western women who menstruate every month come at the cost of higher risk for some cancers, including breast, ovarian, and endometrial. Thus, the Pill, in its release of progestin, could have the positive effect of simulating the near-continual pregnancies of Indigenous societies and suppressing endometrial cancer. However, in the case of breast cancer, progestin can be a problem, as it causes cell division, which contributes to the disease—meaning that the effects of blocking estrogen are neutralized. In the 1980s, scientists looked for a way to suppress estrogen without using progestin and came up with applying GnRHAs, drugs that disrupt the pituitary-gland signals in the manufacturing of sex hormones. This tricks menstruating bodies into thinking they are menopausal.

John Rock’s efforts at convincing the Catholic Church that the Pill was a continuation of the body’s natural methods of contraception proved futile when the latter protested against the drug’s banishment of a woman’s fertile window. Gladwell sees a missed opportunity for progress: Rock might have been able to succeed with the Catholic Church if he had framed the Pill as an anti-cancer drug that saves lives instead of a life-preventing contraceptive.

Cesar Millan, who runs the famous Dog Psychology Center in South-Central Los Angeles, brands himself the dog whisperer. A Mexican immigrant from Tijuana, he received his training in his experiences with dogs on his grandfather’s farm in Sinaloa. He trains violent, poorly-behaved dogs to obey and not attack their doting owners, who are often reluctant and confused about how to enforce proper discipline. His techniques were chronicled in the show Dog Whisperer, which he hosted on the National Geographic channel.

The secret to Cesar’s control over the most feral beasts is not so much in his actions as in his body language. Anthropologist Brian Hare has found that, even more than primates, who share 98.6% of our genres, dogs are “really interested in humans” and interpret their body language obsessively (134). Posture, breathing rhythm, and evenness or dysregulation of gesture can all impact how a dog responds to us. Dance experts Karen Bradley and Suzi Tortora say that Cesar stands out for being “beautifully organized intraphysically” (136). Thus, his posture, gestures, and physical touch are smooth and precise, which puts a dog at ease by letting them know where they stand in relation to humans.

However, in contrast to Cesar, most of the population have undifferentiated or insufficiently varied bodily phrasing. Ironically, while Scott, owner of troublesome dog JonBee, was able to use his craggy physicality to great impact as a character actor, he could not get Cesar’s results merely by copying his soothing voice and belly rubs. This was because his gestures were too abrupt and his face was too tense, causing the dog to mirror his aggression. The problem was that Scott’s physicality did not match his peacemaking intentions.

Interestingly, Cesar’s interest in dogs was originally accompanied by a lack of empathy for people. For example, he risked his marriage, to a woman called Illusion, because he preferred spending time with dogs and did not show her sufficient affection or respect. Cesar entered therapy and realized he had to enter his wife’s head as much as he did those of his dogs. This impacted his healing practice, too, as he realized that he had to address the problems of people as much as those of dogs. When on his TV show he met a woman who would not discipline her dog and was willing to let him continue biting her son, Cesar gave up the case, horrified at the disparity between the woman’s pronouncement of loving her son and her unloving actions toward him.