Pepsi Challenge

in a labrion.

Someone's never done the Pepsi challenge.

Wait, I'm sorry.

What is the Pepsi challenge? Oh, you know the Pepsi challenge? I don't know what that is.

It's like they did a bunch of commercials about this in like the 90s where it was like people took two glasses of drink and then like wore a blindfold or something and then drank Pepsi and drank Coke and asked which one is better.

Oh,

I understand I'm begging the

question

[laughs]

What if we did the Pepsi Challenge with you?

[laughs] What's that?

You never ha- had a soda? You've never had a Coke or anything?

Wow

... regularly drank so- caffeinated soda.

Dear, let me tell you what the Pepsi Challenge was.

Yes.

At the time, it wasn't actually a mystery as to why they did this, why they made a change.

It had been about five years straight of Pepsi advertising the fact that in what was known as the Pepsi Challenge, when people were not told what they were drinking and they were doing a taste test between Pepsi and Coke, Pepsi was winning.

And executives at Coke believed that this is because Pepsi was sweeter and they wanted to have a sweeter and smoother taste for Coca-Cola.

By the way, and this was not planned, the executive at Coca-Cola at the time who was most responsible for this decision, a man named Brian Dyson, just died.

You've heard me say this.

I call it the Pepsi Challenge verse of the Bible.

God says, try it, you'll like it.

I dare you.

I told you, I've been taking the

Pepsi Challenge with other kinds of cigars.

I find it Vinny's.

but diamond crown is still the king.

And he specifically said, stack my watch against the Christopher Ward.

Put the Pepsi Challenge.

Bold statement.

Do you know what I mean? Knowing especially that we're both big fans of Christopher Ward.

So of course we buy our C63s and we're like, oh man, they're the only guys in the league doing this stuff.

And then like, without realizing we saw this watch in April and just didn't realize it had loom blocks.

So then we started talking to Ryan, and he's like, oh, it's got lume blocks, and I'll give it the Pepsi Challenge against anything.

And it's like, yeah, okay, good job, because your Pepsi Challenge is the shit out of that, Ryan.

They were fought in grocery stores, in TV commercials, and in your fridge.

There was the Pepsi Challenge, the new Coke, and the triumphant return of Coca-Cola Classic, and everybody chose a side.

You probably have a favorite in your fridge right now.

But years before all of that, the cola wars were being fought in a battlefield called Disneyland.

Pepsi gets Frontierland and Adventureland over by where their attraction is, and Coke had Main Street and Fantasyland where their attraction is.

And Tomorrowland, though, at the Space Bar, you could actually get Pepsi and Coke at the same counter.

You could try the Pepsi Challenge actually before it existed.

Disneyland's opening day itself was kind of a disaster.

I was out with some friends last night and we were talking, these two girls were talking about a sandwich.

One was in the vegan sandwich and I was like, we need to do a Pepsi challenge between these vegetarian sandwiches.

And they go, what do you mean Pepsi challenge? I'm like, am I that old? At what point does the generation not know what the Pepsi challenge is, right? It's just a way to say you're having a competition between two items to see which one's better.

I mean, that's crazy.

All right, let's run through what we got cooking here today.

Back in 1983, I think it was, Steve Jobs personally invited John Sculley, who was the CEO of PepsiCo.

He was the guy who came up with the Pepsi Challenge.

Absolutely brilliant consumer marketer, but not really the right guy for the tech world.

And famously, Steve Jobs told him, do you want to spend your life selling sugar water, or do you want to change the world? Scully accepted the invitation and in an unexpected turn of events ended up firing Steve Jobs in 1985.