WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.000 There's currently over a thousand TEDTalks on the TED website. 00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:07.000 And I guess many of you here 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:09.000 think that this is quite fantastic -- 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:11.000 except for me. I don't agree with this. 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:13.000 I think we have a situation here. 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:16.000 Because if you think about it, 1,000 TEDTalks, 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:19.000 that's over 1,000 ideas worth spreading. 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:21.000 How on earth 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:23.000 are you going to spread a thousand ideas? 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:25.000 Even if you just try to get all of those ideas into your head 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:27.000 by watching all those thousand TED videos, 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:30.000 it would actually currently take you 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:32.000 over 250 hours to do so. 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:34.000 And I did a little calculation of this. 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:37.000 The damage to the economy for each one who does this 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:39.000 is around $15,000. 00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:42.000 So having seen this danger to the economy, 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:45.000 I thought, we need to find a solution to this problem. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:47.000 Here's my approach to it all. 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:49.000 If you look at the current situation, 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:51.000 you have a thousand TEDTalks. 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:53.000 Each of those TEDTalks has an average length 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:55.000 of about 2,300 words. 00:00:55.000 --> 00:00:57.000 Now take this together 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:00.000 and you end up with 2.3 million words of TEDTalks, 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:03.000 which is about three Bibles-worth of content. 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:05.000 The obvious question here is, 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:08.000 does a TEDTalk really need 2,300 words? 00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:10.000 Isn't there something shorter? 00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:12.000 I mean, if you have an idea worth spreading, 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:14.000 surely you can put it into something shorter 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:16.000 than 2,300 words. 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:18.000 The only question is, how short can you get? 00:01:18.000 --> 00:01:20.000 What's the minimum amount of words 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:22.000 you would need to do a TEDTalk? NOTE Paragraph 00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:24.000 While I was pondering this question, 00:01:24.000 --> 00:01:27.000 I came across this urban legend about Ernest Hemingway, 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:30.000 who allegedly said that these six words here: 00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:33.000 "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," 00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:36.000 were the best novel he had ever written. 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:38.000 And I also encountered a project called Six-Word Memoirs 00:01:38.000 --> 00:01:40.000 where people were asked, 00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:43.000 take your whole life and please sum this up into six words, such as these here: 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:45.000 "Found true love, married someone else." 00:01:45.000 --> 00:01:48.000 Or "Living in existential vacuum; it sucks." 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:50.000 I actually like that one. 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:53.000 So if a novel can be put into six words 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:56.000 and a whole memoir can be put into six words, 00:01:56.000 --> 00:01:59.000 you don't need more than six words for a TEDTalk. 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:01.000 We could have been done by lunch here. 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:04.000 I mean ... 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:06.000 And if you did this for all thousand TEDTalks, 00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:09.000 you would get from 2.3 million words down to 6,000. 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:11.000 So I thought this was quite worthwhile. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:11.000 --> 00:02:13.000 So I started asking all my friends, 00:02:13.000 --> 00:02:16.000 please take your favorite TEDTalk and put that into six words. 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:18.000 So here are some of the results that I received. I think they're quite nice. 00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:20.000 For example, Dan Pink's talk on motivation, 00:02:20.000 --> 00:02:22.000 which was pretty good if you haven't seen it: 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:24.000 "Drop carrot. Drop stick. Bring meaning." 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:27.000 It's what he's basically talking about in those 18 and a half minutes. 00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:29.000 Or some even included references to the speakers, 00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:31.000 such as Nathan Myhrvold's speaking style, 00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:33.000 or the one of Tim Ferriss, 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:36.000 which might be considered a bit strenuous at times. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:39.000 The challenge here is, if I try to systematically do this, 00:02:39.000 --> 00:02:41.000 I would probably end up with a lot of summaries, 00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:43.000 but not with many friends in the end. 00:02:43.000 --> 00:02:45.000 So I had to find a different method, 00:02:45.000 --> 00:02:47.000 preferably involving total strangers. 00:02:47.000 --> 00:02:50.000 And luckily there's a website for that called Mechanical Turk, 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:52.000 which is a website where you can post tasks 00:02:52.000 --> 00:02:54.000 that you don't want to do yourself, 00:02:54.000 --> 00:02:57.000 such as "Please summarize this text for me in six words." 00:02:57.000 --> 00:03:00.000 And I didn't allow any low-cost countries to work on this, 00:03:00.000 --> 00:03:04.000 but I found out I could get a six-word summary for just 10 cents, 00:03:04.000 --> 00:03:06.000 which I think is a pretty good price. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:06.000 --> 00:03:08.000 Even then, unfortunately, 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:11.000 it's not possible to summarize each TEDTalk individually. 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:13.000 Because if you do the math, you have a thousand TEDTalks, 00:03:13.000 --> 00:03:15.000 the pay 10 cents each; 00:03:15.000 --> 00:03:18.000 you have to do more than one summary for each of those talks, 00:03:18.000 --> 00:03:21.000 because some of them will probably be, or are, really bad. 00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:24.000 So I would end up paying hundreds of dollars. 00:03:24.000 --> 00:03:26.000 So I thought of a different way 00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:29.000 by thinking, well, the talks revolve around certain themes. 00:03:29.000 --> 00:03:31.000 So what if I don't let people summarize 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:33.000 individual TEDTalks to six words, 00:03:33.000 --> 00:03:35.000 but give them 10 TEDTalks at the same time 00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:38.000 and say, "Please do a six-word summary for that one." 00:03:38.000 --> 00:03:40.000 I would cut my costs by 90 percent. 00:03:40.000 --> 00:03:43.000 So for $60, 00:03:43.000 --> 00:03:45.000 I could summarize a thousand TEDTalks 00:03:45.000 --> 00:03:47.000 into just 600 summaries, 00:03:47.000 --> 00:03:49.000 which would actually be quite nice. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:49.000 --> 00:03:51.000 Now some of you might actually right now be thinking, 00:03:51.000 --> 00:03:54.000 It's downright crazy to have 10 TEDTalks summarized into just six words. 00:03:54.000 --> 00:03:56.000 But it's actually not, 00:03:56.000 --> 00:03:59.000 because there's an example by statistics professor, Hans Rosling. 00:03:59.000 --> 00:04:01.000 I guess many of you have seen one or more of his talks. 00:04:01.000 --> 00:04:03.000 He's got eight talks online, 00:04:03.000 --> 00:04:06.000 and those talks can basically be summed up into just four words, 00:04:06.000 --> 00:04:08.000 because that's all he's basically showing us, 00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:10.000 our intuition is really bad. 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:12.000 He always proves us wrong. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:12.000 --> 00:04:15.000 So people on the Internet, some didn't do so well. 00:04:15.000 --> 00:04:17.000 I mean, when I asked them to summarize the 10 TEDTalks at the same time, 00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:19.000 some took the easy route out. 00:04:19.000 --> 00:04:22.000 They just had some general comment. 00:04:22.000 --> 00:04:25.000 There were others, and I found this quite cheeky. 00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:27.000 They used their six words to talk back to me 00:04:27.000 --> 00:04:31.000 and ask me if I'd been too much on Google lately. 00:04:31.000 --> 00:04:34.000 And finally also, I never understood this, 00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:37.000 some people really came up with their own version of the truth. 00:04:37.000 --> 00:04:40.000 I don't know any TEDTalk that contains this. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:42.000 But, oh well. In the end, however, 00:04:42.000 --> 00:04:44.000 and this is really amazing, 00:04:44.000 --> 00:04:46.000 for each of those 10 TEDTalk clusters that I submitted, 00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:48.000 I actually received meaningful summaries. 00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:50.000 Here are some of my favorites. 00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:52.000 For example, for all the TEDTalks around food, 00:04:52.000 --> 00:04:54.000 someone summed this up into: "Food shaping body, brains and environment," 00:04:54.000 --> 00:04:56.000 which I think is pretty good. 00:04:56.000 --> 00:04:58.000 Or happiness: "Striving toward happiness = 00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:00.000 moving toward unhappiness." NOTE Paragraph 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:02.000 So here I was. 00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:04.000 I had started out with a thousand TEDTalks 00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:07.000 and I had 600 six-word summaries for those. 00:05:07.000 --> 00:05:09.000 Actually it sounded nice in the beginning, 00:05:09.000 --> 00:05:11.000 but when you look at 600 summaries, it's quite a lot. 00:05:11.000 --> 00:05:13.000 It's a huge list. 00:05:13.000 --> 00:05:17.000 So I thought, I probably have to take this one step further here 00:05:17.000 --> 00:05:20.000 and create summaries of the summaries -- and this is exactly what I did. 00:05:20.000 --> 00:05:22.000 So I took the 600 summaries that I had, 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:24.000 put them into nine groups 00:05:24.000 --> 00:05:28.000 according to the ratings that the talks had originally received on TED.com 00:05:28.000 --> 00:05:31.000 and asked people to do summaries of those. 00:05:31.000 --> 00:05:33.000 Again, there were some misunderstandings. 00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:35.000 For example, when I had a cluster of all the beautiful talks, 00:05:35.000 --> 00:05:38.000 someone thought I was just trying to find the ultimate pick-up line. 00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:41.000 But in the end, amazingly, 00:05:41.000 --> 00:05:43.000 again, people were able to do it. 00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:45.000 For example, all the courageous TEDTalks: 00:05:45.000 --> 00:05:47.000 "People dying," or "People suffering," was also one, 00:05:47.000 --> 00:05:49.000 "with easy solutions around." 00:05:49.000 --> 00:05:51.000 Or the recipe for the ultimate jaw-dropping TEDTalk: 00:05:51.000 --> 00:05:54.000 "Flickr photos of intergalactic classical composer." 00:05:54.000 --> 00:05:57.000 I mean that's the essence of it all. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:57.000 --> 00:05:59.000 Now I had my nine groups, 00:05:59.000 --> 00:06:02.000 but, I mean, it's already quite a reduction. 00:06:02.000 --> 00:06:05.000 But of course, once you are that far, you're not really satisfied. 00:06:05.000 --> 00:06:08.000 I wanted to go all the way, all the way down the distillery, 00:06:08.000 --> 00:06:10.000 starting out with a thousand TEDTalks. 00:06:10.000 --> 00:06:13.000 I wanted to have a thousand TEDTalks summarized into just six words -- 00:06:13.000 --> 00:06:17.000 which would be a 99.9997 percent reduction in content. 00:06:17.000 --> 00:06:20.000 And I would only pay $99.50 -- 00:06:20.000 --> 00:06:23.000 so stay even below a hundred dollars for it. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:23.000 --> 00:06:25.000 So I had 50 overall summaries done. 00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:27.000 This time I paid 25 cents 00:06:27.000 --> 00:06:30.000 because I thought the task was a bit harder. 00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:32.000 And unfortunately when I first received the answers -- 00:06:32.000 --> 00:06:34.000 and here you'll see six of the answers -- 00:06:34.000 --> 00:06:36.000 I was a bit disappointed. 00:06:36.000 --> 00:06:39.000 Because I think you'll agree, they all summarize some aspect of TED, 00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:41.000 but to me they felt a bit bland, 00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:44.000 or they just had a certain aspect of TED in them. 00:06:44.000 --> 00:06:47.000 So I was almost ready to give up 00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:49.000 when one night I played around with these sentences 00:06:49.000 --> 00:06:53.000 and found out that there's actually a beautiful solution in here. 00:06:53.000 --> 00:06:56.000 So here it is, 00:06:56.000 --> 00:07:00.000 a crowd-sourced, six-word summary of a thousand TEDTalks 00:07:00.000 --> 00:07:03.000 at the value of $99.50: 00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:05.000 "Why the worry? I'd rather wonder." NOTE Paragraph 00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:07.000 Thank you very much. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:07.000 --> 00:07:12.000 (Applause)