Ben Gilbert

We're trying to do a better job creating recyclable stuff, using recyclable.

But like, the world is full of a crap ton of single-use plastics.

It's funny, I've like accidentally started doing that anyway, because whenever I travel now, I use those Path water bottles that they sell in airports, and you can just refill them.

I'm not like going out of my way to be like, oh my gosh, I need the metal over the plastic, but like now it just feels weird to buy plastic bottles.

Now that I'm so much more attuned to microplastics, I'm also never going to drink alcohol.

fluid that was sitting in a plastic bottle for a long time after i opened it or like refill it i used to refill plastic water bottles and now i'm like who knows what's degrading in my beverage so but yeah this is the start of the plastification yes so back to the timeline don kendall the ceo is like okay you passed the test you are now going to take over all of marketing for pepsi and i want you to figure out how we're going to dethrone coke

And they did this at malls all across America.

They then really expanded this.

I didn't even realize it was grassroots.

I mean, everyone knows that the Pepsi challenge is almost like a descriptive way to describe a form of marketing.

Like do you remember when Microsoft did Bing it on?

It was like, oh, I see the Pepsi challenge for search.

Being our age, David, I knew what the Pepsi challenge was, but of course I've never actually seen it.

Right.

I hadn't seen it either.

And it's funny to now actually go watch it and see how that meets my expectations of what I thought it was going to be.

It's good counterpositioning.

But the punchline of the whole thing is it wouldn't have worked if it wasn't true.

But it was true that people did prefer the taste of Pepsi.

Pepsi basically never was able to break into the fountain business and the volumes that even today Coke kind of ran away with the restaurant serving soft drinks out of fountains business.