WEBVTT

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There's currently over a thousand
TED Talks on the TED website.

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And I guess many of you here
think that this is quite fantastic,

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except for me, I don't agree with this.

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I think we have a situation here.

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Because if you think about it,
1,000 TED Talks,

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that's over 1,000 ideas worth spreading.

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How on earth are you going
to spread a thousand ideas?

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Even if you just try
to get all of those ideas into your head

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by watching all those thousand TED videos,

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it would actually currently take you
over 250 hours to do so.

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And I did a little calculation of this.

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The damage to the economy for each one
who does this is around $15,000.

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So having seen this danger to the economy,

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I thought, we need to find
a solution to this problem.

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Here's my approach to it all.

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If you look at the current situation,
you have a thousand TED Talks.

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Each of those TED Talks has
an average length of about 2,300 words.

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Now take this together, and you end up
with 2.3 million words of TED Talks,

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which is about
three Bibles-worth of content.

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(Laughter)

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The obvious question here is,
does a TED Talk really need 2,300 words?

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Isn't there something shorter?

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I mean, if you have
an idea worth spreading,

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surely you can put it
into something shorter than 2,300 words.

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The only question is,
how short can you get?

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What's the minimum amount of words
you would need to do a TED Talk?

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While I was pondering this question,

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I came across this urban legend
about Ernest Hemingway,

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who allegedly said
that these six words here:

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"For sale: baby shoes, never worn,"

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were the best novel he had ever written.

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And I also encountered a project
called Six-Word Memoirs

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where people were asked,
take your whole life

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and please sum this up
into six words, such as these here:

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"Found true love, married someone else."

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Or "Living in existential
vacuum; it sucks."

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I actually like that one.

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So if a novel can be put into six words

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and a whole memoir can be put
into six words,

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you don't need more than six
words for a TED Talk.

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We could have been done by lunch here.

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(Laughter)

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And if you did this
for all thousand TED Talks,

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you would get from 2.3 million
words down to 6,000.

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So I thought this was quite worthwhile.

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So I started asking all my friends,

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please take your favorite TED Talk
and put that into six words.

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So here are some of the results
that I received.

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I think they're quite nice.

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For example, Dan Pink's talk
on motivation, which was pretty good,

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if you haven't seen it:
"Drop carrot. Drop stick. Bring meaning."

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It's what he's basically talking about
in those 18,5 minutes.

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Or some even included references
to the speakers,

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such as Nathan Myhrvold's speaking style,
or the one of Tim Ferriss,

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which might be considered
a bit strenuous at times.

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The challenge here is,
if I try to systematically do this,

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I would probably end up
with a lot of summaries,

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but not with many friends in the end.

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So I had to find a different method,
preferably involving total strangers.

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And luckily, there's a website for that,
called Mechanical Turk,

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which is a website
where you can post tasks

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that you don't want to do yourself,

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such as "Please summarize this text
for me in six words."

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And I didn't allow any low-cost
countries to work on this,

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but I found out I could get
a six-word summary for just 10 cents,

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which I think is a pretty good price.

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Even then, unfortunately,

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it's not possible to summarize
each TED Talk individually.

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Because if you do the math,
you have a thousand TED Talks,

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you pay 10 cents each;

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you have to do more than one summary
for each of those talks,

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because some of them will probably
be, or are, really bad.

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So I would end up paying
hundreds of dollars.

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So I thought of a different way,

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by thinking, well, the talks
revolve around certain themes.

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So what if I don't let people summarize
individual TED Talks to six words,

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but give them 10 TED Talks
at the same time

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and say, "Please do a six-word
summary for that one."

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I would cut my costs by 90 percent.

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So for $60,

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I could summarize a thousand TED Talks
into just 600 summaries,

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which would actually be quite nice.

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Obviously, some people that did that -

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of course, I payed everyone the 10 cents -

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Some of you might actually
right now be thinking,

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it's downright crazy to have 10 TED Talks
summarized into just six words.

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But it's actually not,

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because there's an example
by statistics professor Hans Rosling.

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I guess many of you have seen
one or more of his talks.

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He's got eight talks online,

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and those can basically be summed up
into just four words,

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because that's all he's basically
showing us, our intuition is really bad.

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He always proves us wrong.

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So people on the Internet,
some didn't do so well.

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And when I asked them to summarize
the 10 TED Talks at the same time,

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some took the easy route out.

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They just had some general comment.

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Others -

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There were others --
and I found this quite cheeky --

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They used their six words
to talk back to me

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and ask me if I'd been too much
on Google lately.

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(Laughter)

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And finally also, I never understood this,

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some people really came up
with their own version of the truth.

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I don't know any TED Talk
that contains this.

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But, oh well.

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In the end, however,
and this is really amazing,

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for each of those 10 TED Talk
clusters that I submitted,

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I actually received meaningful summaries.

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Here are some of my favorites.

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For example, for the TED Talks about food,

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someone summed this up into: "Food shaping
body, brains and environment,"

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which I think is pretty good.

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Or happiness: "Striving toward happiness =
moving toward unhappiness."

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So here I was.

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I had started out
with a thousand TED Talks

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and I had 600 six-word
summaries for those.

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Actually, it sounded nice
in the beginning,

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but when you look at 600 summaries,
it's quite a lot, it's a huge list.

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(Laughter)

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So I thought, I probably have
to take this one step further here

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and create summaries of the summaries,
and this is exactly what I did.

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So I took the 600 summaries that I had,
put them into nine groups

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according to the ratings that the talks
had originally received on TED.com

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and asked people to do summaries of those.

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Again, there were some misunderstandings.

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For example, when I had a cluster
of all the "Beautiful" talks,

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someone thought I was just trying
to find the ultimate pick-up line.

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But in the end, amazingly,

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again, people were able to do it.

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For example, all the courageous TED Talks:

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"People dying" or "People
suffering" was also one,

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"with easy solutions around."

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Or the recipe for the ultimate
jaw-dropping TED Talk:

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"Flickr photos of intergalactic
classical composer."

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I mean that's the essence of it all.

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Now I had my nine groups, but, I mean,
it's already quite a reduction.

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But of course, once you are that far,
you're not really satisfied.

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I wanted to go all the way,
all the way down the distillery,

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starting out with a thousand TED Talks.

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I wanted to have a thousand TED Talks
summarized into just six words --

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which would be a 99.9997 percent
reduction in content.

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And I would only pay $99.50 --

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so stay even below $100 for it.

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So I had 50 overall summaries done.

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This time I paid 25 cents

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because I thought the task
was a bit harder.

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And unfortunately,
when I first received the answers --

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and here, you'll see six of the answers --
I was a bit disappointed.

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Because I think you'll agree,
they all summarize some aspect of TED,

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but to me, they felt a bit bland,

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or they just had
a certain aspect of TED in them.

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So I was almost ready to give up

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when one night, I played around
with these sentences

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and found out that there's actually
a beautiful solution in here.

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So here it is,

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a crowd-sourced, six-word
summary of a thousand TED Talks

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at the value of $99.50:

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"Why the worry? I'd rather wonder."

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)