Hi, my name is Ola Rosling.
and I'm Anna Rosling Rönnlund.
We founded the Gapminder Foundation
together with Hans Rosling,
Ola's father.
Together, the three of us have written a book:
Factfulness.
And it's actually gonna be available
in 24 languages pretty soon.
Unfortunately, one year ago
my father passed away
in the middle of writing the book together with us.
And since then
the two of us have spent night and day
finalising the book.
So we are very, very happy
that finally its ready.
And we are now gonna show you a clip
that we recorded two years ago
together with Hans.
It explains how we ended up deciding
to write this book.
It all started in this very living room.
17 years ago.
And at the dinner I couldn't resist
showing you my first version of this bubble graph
where each bubble is a country,
down here income,
here health, and color was different continents
And I remember that you sort of liked it.
Yeah, I did and we actually brought it home and
do you remember, we put it on our wall at home.
And the fun thing was that our friends also started liking it
So they started talking about the bubbles and so on and we....
I think that was the starting point
when we realised that we really wanted to work further on the project.
So you were making an animated version of it,
and you started using the animated version on your lectures.
And it seemed quite popular.
And then we attracted so much data,
actually, so we realised, this won't work.
We need to somehow scale it up.
We were very lucky.
At that first TED talk in 2006.
We prepared jointly, my talk.
And then, when I had finished the talk,
two persons came rushing up on the stage.
First was Al Gore.
And the second was a little shorter.
It was Larry Page. The co-founder of Google.
And Larry Page looked at me, you know,
the old professor, then he said:
“Who wrote the code?”
He understood directly that this old man
hadn't done the code.
And I had to answer:
“Well, its my son, his wife and their team of programmers.”
“They are invited to come to Google and present it.”
Our hope was that Google would kind of steal the idea.
Instead they wanted us to work at Google,
to develop what later became Google Public Data.
Where users across the World can search data
and we liberated, together with the World Bank,
public data, and also from Eurostat, and others.
So, that in the search results,
you can find the latest statistics from the official source.
So that's a great achievement
to democratise access to data.
Unfortunately very few people search for data
and if you find the data, its often fragmented
You don't get the big worldview
from fragments in a Google result.
We went back to Gapminder
where we had left Hans some years earlier,
to actually develop teaching materials.
And for us to prioritise
we realised we should go out and just measure.
But what was the sad news, or shocking even,
was that people knew barely nothing, right?
The ignorance was so massive.
And you did public surveys,
with survey companies, through the internet.
and with those results, I said
“But the professional groups I lecture to now...”
you know, "...in United Nations, in universities and corporate sector...”
“They must know this.”
Then we got these answering devices.
where you can put questions and answers.
And to our surprise, we found the same lack of knowledge
of major demographic change, health change, economic change in the world.
And that's when we realised we have to write a book,
where we put all these things together.
And this is the book called Factfulness,
that we have done together.
This clip was recorded two years ago.
And since then, the Gapminder foundation has tested the general public
in 14 countries,
with fact-questions about the state of the World.
The results were absolutely terrible!
Even worse than we expected.
Among 12,000 people,
The vast majority got almost all the questions wrong,
as you will see in the book.
It seems like people are suffering from
an overdramatic worldview.
They think the world is in much worse shape
than it actually is.
And this leads to terrible decisions
and tons of unnecessary stress.
To solve this problem though,
we needed to understand how is it even possible
that so many people
are getting so many things so wrong?
Well, fortunately we found clear patterns
behind the common misconceptions.
And together with Hans,
we identified the 10 dramatic instincts
that make people misinterpret the World
again and again
and leading to an over dramatic world view.
It all sounds bad, but actually,
Our book
Actually, our book is truly comforting
because it gives you concrete rules of thumb
to control your dramatic instincts.
And it actually teaches you
the new relaxing thinking habit
which we call Factfulness.
And Hans´s stories are really fun.