1000 TEDTalks, 6 words
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0:00 - 0:04There's currently over a thousand TEDTalks on the TED website.
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0:04 - 0:07And I guess many of you here
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0:07 - 0:09think that this is quite fantastic --
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0:09 - 0:11except for me. I don't agree with this.
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0:11 - 0:13I think we have a situation here.
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0:13 - 0:16Because if you think about it, 1,000 TEDTalks,
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0:16 - 0:19that's over 1,000 ideas worth spreading.
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0:19 - 0:21How on earth
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0:21 - 0:23are you going to spread a thousand ideas?
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0:23 - 0:25Even if you just try to get all of those ideas into your head
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0:25 - 0:27by watching all those thousand TED videos,
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0:27 - 0:30it would actually currently take you
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0:30 - 0:32over 250 hours to do so.
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0:32 - 0:34And I did a little calculation of this.
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0:34 - 0:37The damage to the economy for each one who does this
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0:37 - 0:39is around $15,000.
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0:39 - 0:42So having seen this danger to the economy,
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0:42 - 0:45I thought, we need to find a solution to this problem.
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0:45 - 0:47Here's my approach to it all.
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0:47 - 0:49If you look at the current situation,
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0:49 - 0:51you have a thousand TEDTalks.
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0:51 - 0:53Each of those TEDTalks has an average length
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0:53 - 0:55of about 2,300 words.
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0:55 - 0:57Now take this together
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0:57 - 1:00and you end up with 2.3 million words of TEDTalks,
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1:00 - 1:03which is about three Bibles-worth of content.
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1:03 - 1:05The obvious question here is,
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1:05 - 1:08does a TEDTalk really need 2,300 words?
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1:08 - 1:10Isn't there something shorter?
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1:10 - 1:12I mean, if you have an idea worth spreading,
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1:12 - 1:14surely you can put it into something shorter
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1:14 - 1:16than 2,300 words.
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1:16 - 1:18The only question is, how short can you get?
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1:18 - 1:20What's the minimum amount of words
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1:20 - 1:22you would need to do a TEDTalk?
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1:22 - 1:24While I was pondering this question,
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1:24 - 1:27I came across this urban legend about Ernest Hemingway,
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1:27 - 1:30who allegedly said that these six words here:
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1:30 - 1:33"For sale: baby shoes, never worn,"
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1:33 - 1:36were the best novel he had ever written.
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1:36 - 1:38And I also encountered a project called Six-Word Memoirs
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1:38 - 1:40where people were asked,
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1:40 - 1:43take your whole life and please sum this up into six words, such as these here:
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1:43 - 1:45"Found true love, married someone else."
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1:45 - 1:48Or "Living in existential vacuum; it sucks."
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1:48 - 1:50I actually like that one.
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1:50 - 1:53So if a novel can be put into six words
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1:53 - 1:56and a whole memoir can be put into six words,
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1:56 - 1:59you don't need more than six words for a TEDTalk.
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1:59 - 2:01We could have been done by lunch here.
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2:01 - 2:04I mean ...
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2:04 - 2:06And if you did this for all thousand TEDTalks,
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2:06 - 2:09you would get from 2.3 million words down to 6,000.
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2:09 - 2:11So I thought this was quite worthwhile.
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2:11 - 2:13So I started asking all my friends,
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2:13 - 2:16please take your favorite TEDTalk and put that into six words.
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2:16 - 2:18So here are some of the results that I received. I think they're quite nice.
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2:18 - 2:20For example, Dan Pink's talk on motivation,
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2:20 - 2:22which was pretty good if you haven't seen it:
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2:22 - 2:24"Drop carrot. Drop stick. Bring meaning."
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2:24 - 2:27It's what he's basically talking about in those 18 and a half minutes.
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2:27 - 2:29Or some even included references to the speakers,
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2:29 - 2:31such as Nathan Myhrvold's speaking style,
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2:31 - 2:33or the one of Tim Ferriss,
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2:33 - 2:36which might be considered a bit strenuous at times.
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2:36 - 2:39The challenge here is, if I try to systematically do this,
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2:39 - 2:41I would probably end up with a lot of summaries,
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2:41 - 2:43but not with many friends in the end.
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2:43 - 2:45So I had to find a different method,
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2:45 - 2:47preferably involving total strangers.
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2:47 - 2:50And luckily there's a website for that called Mechanical Turk,
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2:50 - 2:52which is a website where you can post tasks
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2:52 - 2:54that you don't want to do yourself,
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2:54 - 2:57such as "Please summarize this text for me in six words."
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2:57 - 3:00And I didn't allow any low-cost countries to work on this,
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3:00 - 3:04but I found out I could get a six-word summary for just 10 cents,
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3:04 - 3:06which I think is a pretty good price.
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3:06 - 3:08Even then, unfortunately,
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3:08 - 3:11it's not possible to summarize each TEDTalk individually.
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3:11 - 3:13Because if you do the math, you have a thousand TEDTalks,
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3:13 - 3:15the pay 10 cents each;
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3:15 - 3:18you have to do more than one summary for each of those talks,
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3:18 - 3:21because some of them will probably be, or are, really bad.
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3:21 - 3:24So I would end up paying hundreds of dollars.
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3:24 - 3:26So I thought of a different way
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3:26 - 3:29by thinking, well, the talks revolve around certain themes.
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3:29 - 3:31So what if I don't let people summarize
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3:31 - 3:33individual TEDTalks to six words,
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3:33 - 3:35but give them 10 TEDTalks at the same time
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3:35 - 3:38and say, "Please do a six-word summary for that one."
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3:38 - 3:40I would cut my costs by 90 percent.
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3:40 - 3:43So for $60,
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3:43 - 3:45I could summarize a thousand TEDTalks
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3:45 - 3:47into just 600 summaries,
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3:47 - 3:49which would actually be quite nice.
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3:49 - 3:51Now some of you might actually right now be thinking,
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3:51 - 3:54It's downright crazy to have 10 TEDTalks summarized into just six words.
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3:54 - 3:56But it's actually not,
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3:56 - 3:59because there's an example by statistics professor, Hans Rosling.
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3:59 - 4:01I guess many of you have seen one or more of his talks.
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4:01 - 4:03He's got eight talks online,
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4:03 - 4:06and those talks can basically be summed up into just four words,
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4:06 - 4:08because that's all he's basically showing us,
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4:08 - 4:10our intuition is really bad.
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4:10 - 4:12He always proves us wrong.
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4:12 - 4:15So people on the Internet, some didn't do so well.
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4:15 - 4:17I mean, when I asked them to summarize the 10 TEDTalks at the same time,
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4:17 - 4:19some took the easy route out.
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4:19 - 4:22They just had some general comment.
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4:22 - 4:25There were others, and I found this quite cheeky.
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4:25 - 4:27They used their six words to talk back to me
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4:27 - 4:31and ask me if I'd been too much on Google lately.
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4:31 - 4:34And finally also, I never understood this,
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4:34 - 4:37some people really came up with their own version of the truth.
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4:37 - 4:40I don't know any TEDTalk that contains this.
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4:40 - 4:42But, oh well. In the end, however,
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4:42 - 4:44and this is really amazing,
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4:44 - 4:46for each of those 10 TEDTalk clusters that I submitted,
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4:46 - 4:48I actually received meaningful summaries.
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4:48 - 4:50Here are some of my favorites.
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4:50 - 4:52For example, for all the TEDTalks around food,
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4:52 - 4:54someone summed this up into: "Food shaping body, brains and environment,"
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4:54 - 4:56which I think is pretty good.
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4:56 - 4:58Or happiness: "Striving toward happiness =
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4:58 - 5:00moving toward unhappiness."
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5:00 - 5:02So here I was.
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5:02 - 5:04I had started out with a thousand TEDTalks
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5:04 - 5:07and I had 600 six-word summaries for those.
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5:07 - 5:09Actually it sounded nice in the beginning,
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5:09 - 5:11but when you look at 600 summaries, it's quite a lot.
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5:11 - 5:13It's a huge list.
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5:13 - 5:17So I thought, I probably have to take this one step further here
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5:17 - 5:20and create summaries of the summaries -- and this is exactly what I did.
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5:20 - 5:22So I took the 600 summaries that I had,
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5:22 - 5:24put them into nine groups
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5:24 - 5:28according to the ratings that the talks had originally received on TED.com
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5:28 - 5:31and asked people to do summaries of those.
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5:31 - 5:33Again, there were some misunderstandings.
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5:33 - 5:35For example, when I had a cluster of all the beautiful talks,
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5:35 - 5:38someone thought I was just trying to find the ultimate pick-up line.
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5:38 - 5:41But in the end, amazingly,
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5:41 - 5:43again, people were able to do it.
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5:43 - 5:45For example, all the courageous TEDTalks:
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5:45 - 5:47"People dying," or "People suffering," was also one,
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5:47 - 5:49"with easy solutions around."
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5:49 - 5:51Or the recipe for the ultimate jaw-dropping TEDTalk:
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5:51 - 5:54"Flickr photos of intergalactic classical composer."
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5:54 - 5:57I mean that's the essence of it all.
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5:57 - 5:59Now I had my nine groups,
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5:59 - 6:02but, I mean, it's already quite a reduction.
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6:02 - 6:05But of course, once you are that far, you're not really satisfied.
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6:05 - 6:08I wanted to go all the way, all the way down the distillery,
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6:08 - 6:10starting out with a thousand TEDTalks.
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6:10 - 6:13I wanted to have a thousand TEDTalks summarized into just six words --
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6:13 - 6:17which would be a 99.9997 percent reduction in content.
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6:17 - 6:20And I would only pay $99.50 --
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6:20 - 6:23so stay even below a hundred dollars for it.
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6:23 - 6:25So I had 50 overall summaries done.
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6:25 - 6:27This time I paid 25 cents
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6:27 - 6:30because I thought the task was a bit harder.
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6:30 - 6:32And unfortunately when I first received the answers --
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6:32 - 6:34and here you'll see six of the answers --
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6:34 - 6:36I was a bit disappointed.
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6:36 - 6:39Because I think you'll agree, they all summarize some aspect of TED,
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6:39 - 6:41but to me they felt a bit bland,
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6:41 - 6:44or they just had a certain aspect of TED in them.
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6:44 - 6:47So I was almost ready to give up
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6:47 - 6:49when one night I played around with these sentences
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6:49 - 6:53and found out that there's actually a beautiful solution in here.
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6:53 - 6:56So here it is,
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6:56 - 7:00a crowd-sourced, six-word summary of a thousand TEDTalks
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7:00 - 7:03at the value of $99.50:
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7:03 - 7:05"Why the worry? I'd rather wonder."
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7:05 - 7:07Thank you very much.
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7:07 - 7:12(Applause)
- Title:
- 1000 TEDTalks, 6 words
- Speaker:
- Sebastian Wernicke
- Description:
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Sebastian Wernicke thinks every TEDTalk can be summarized in six words. At TEDxZurich, he shows how to do just that -- and less.
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- closed TED
- Project:
- TEDTalks
- Duration:
- 07:13
Krystian Aparta commented on English subtitles for 1,000 TED Talks in six words | ||
Krystian Aparta edited English subtitles for 1,000 TED Talks in six words | ||
Krystian Aparta edited English subtitles for 1,000 TED Talks in six words | ||
TED edited English subtitles for 1,000 TED Talks in six words | ||
TED added a translation |
Krystian Aparta
The English transcript was updated on 11/24/2016.