David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…And it’s great. It’s a super dense store of energy. It triggers an emotional response in the brain. Everybody who eats sugar today knows that if you’re eating sugar, it is triggering, I don’t know if it’s dopamine or serotonin, but there’s definitely a stimulus of a happiness release. If you’re a soldier in World War I, you could use a little of that. Yeah. It’s got caffeine. Totally. These soldiers then come home. Right after the war is prohibition in America, so you can no longer buy alcohol, at least legally buy alcohol. All these adults are now like, you need some social lubricant here. What’s the natural alternative? It’s chocolate, which brings us to the candy bar. All of these former penny candy entrepreneurs all around the country, they’re like, wow, chocolate is amazing, we can market to adults, et cetera. It’s expensive. Hershey’s selling their own bars. What if I take just some chocolate, some other stuff, and also make a bar? I could make that a lot cheaper because the other ingredients, whether it’s nuts, nougat, sugar, or whatever, are cheaper. I can develop my own unique taste that people in my region might find appealing. By the end of the 1920s, there are more than 40,000 different candy bars being made in America, almost all of which are these regional entrepreneurial operations. The most infamous of these is, Ben, do you know the story of the Baby Ruth candy bar? No.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.