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