1000 TEDTalks, 6 words

Sebastian Wernicke thinks every TEDTalk can be summarized in six words. At TEDxZurich, he shows how to do just that -- and less.

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

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

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

I think we have a situation here.

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

that's over 1,000 ideas worth spreading.

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

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

by watching all those thousand TED videos,

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

And I did a little calculation of this.

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

So having seen this danger to the economy,

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

Here's my approach to it all.

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

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

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

which is about
three Bibles-worth of content.

(Laughter)

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

Isn't there something shorter?

I mean, if you have
an idea worth spreading,

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

The only question is,
how short can you get?

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

While I was pondering this question,

I came across this urban legend
about Ernest Hemingway,

who allegedly said
that these six words here:

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn,"

were the best novel he had ever written.

And I also encountered a project
called Six-Word Memoirs

where people were asked,
take your whole life

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

"Found true love, married someone else."

Or "Living in existential
vacuum; it sucks."

I actually like that one.

So if a novel can be put into six words

and a whole memoir can be put
into six words,

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

We could have been done by lunch here.

(Laughter)

And if you did this
for all thousand TED Talks,

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

So I thought this was quite worthwhile.

So I started asking all my friends,

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

So here are some of the results
that I received.

I think they're quite nice.

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

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

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

Or some even included references
to the speakers,

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

which might be considered
a bit strenuous at times.

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

I would probably end up
with a lot of summaries,

but not with many friends in the end.

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

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

which is a website
where you can post tasks

that you don't want to do yourself,

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

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

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

which I think is a pretty good price.

Even then, unfortunately,

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

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

you pay 10 cents each;

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

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

So I would end up paying
hundreds of dollars.

So I thought of a different way,

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

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

but give them 10 TED Talks
at the same time

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

I would cut my costs by 90 percent.

So for $60,

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

which would actually be quite nice.

Some of you might actually
right now be thinking,

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

But it's actually not,

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

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

He's got eight talks online,

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

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

He always proves us wrong.

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

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

some took the easy route out.

They just had some general comment.

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

They used their six words
to talk back to me

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

(Laughter)

And finally also, I never understood this,

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

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

But, oh well.

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

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

I actually received meaningful summaries.

Here are some of my favorites.

For example, for the TED Talks about food,

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

which I think is pretty good.

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

So here I was.

I had started out
with a thousand TED Talks

and I had 600 six-word
summaries for those.

Actually, it sounded nice
in the beginning,

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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

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

and asked people to do summaries of those.

Again, there were some misunderstandings.

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

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

But in the end, amazingly,

again, people were able to do it.

For example, all the courageous TED Talks:

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

"with easy solutions around."

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

"Flickr photos of intergalactic
classical composer."

I mean that's the essence of it all.

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

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

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

starting out with a thousand TED Talks.

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

which would be a 99.9997 percent
reduction in content.

And I would only pay $99.50 --

so stay even below $100 for it.

So I had 50 overall summaries done.

This time I paid 25 cents

because I thought the task
was a bit harder.

And unfortunately,
when I first received the answers --

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

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

but to me, they felt a bit bland,

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

So I was almost ready to give up

when one night, I played around
with these sentences

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

So here it is,

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

at the value of $99.50:

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

Thank you very much.

(Applause)