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BRADY FORREST: Hi.
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I'm Brady Forrest.
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Welcome to Ignite.
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We're going to have a fun hour for you to cap off
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your day here at Google IO.
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It's going to be unlike any other session that you were
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in, in that is not heavily scripted.
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It is a bunch of people coming together that share their
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ideas and passions.
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As mentioned, I'm Brady Forrest.
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I am with O'Reilly, and many, many years ago, I start now
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many years ago, I started Ignite.
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I also run Radar and do a bunch of other conferences.
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About 3 years ago, my friend, Bre Pettis and I wanted
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a geek event for our friends in Seattle.
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And we wanted a place where they could share their thoughts
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and passions, but very quickly.
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Because not everybody is that interesting!
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And so, to do that, we set some constraints around it.
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But we wanted to make it a safe place for them to do that.
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We wanted to make it fun for the audience and so all along
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those lines, we invented a torturous format.
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And, we would ply the speakers with beer.
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We would ply the audience with beer.
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I apologize in advance.
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We were unable to procure any for this session.
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But each speaker gets just 20 slides, 15 seconds a slide,
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for a total of 5 minutes.
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The speakers are not in control of their slides entire time.
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So, once they're up here, as you've seen me do, they
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kind of tap dance as their slides change, and, in this
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case, we have 10 talks.
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We're going to be beginning with Clay Johnson, learning
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about the ins and outs of DC, and we are going to be ending
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with, "Where the Hell is Matt?" And "A Great
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Dance Around the World".
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If you want to Tweet about it, share your your thoughts on it,
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look up information about this later, use the hash
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tag, Ignite IO.
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I won't be checking Twitter during this; I'll be too busy
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hoping that Powerpoint doesn't crash just so you know.
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If you've never heard of Ignite, Ignite's in over a
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100 cities around the world.
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It's spread far.
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It's spread wide.
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And if you want to throw your own, just let me know.
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There are thousands of Ignite videos on line
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at IgniteShow.com.
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And it is super easy and fun to start.
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You really just need to borrow a microphone and about 20
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geeks, which I'm sure anyone here could round up.
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Now, I'd like to welcome up our first speaker.
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He is based in DC.
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He's one of the people charged with basically trying to
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make our government more transparent.
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He does this through Sunlight Labs.
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Please welcome up their CTO, Clay Johnson.
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CLAY JOHNSON: How are you guys doing?
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No, no, no no!
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Come on!
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This is Ignite!
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This is Ignite!
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That's what I'm talking about!
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I'm Clay Johnson.
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I direct Sunlight Lab at the Sunlight Foundation.
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My primary job is fighting Zombies.
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I fight Zombies in Washington DC, where a lot of
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them get created.
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And we work with government data.
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And I need your help to fight these Zombies too.
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Zombies, for the most part, are being generated by bad
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information and bad access to information, generally
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by people like this.
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This is Glenn Beck and he is a Zombie producer.
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Also Keith Olbermann, in the interest of partisanship,
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is also a Zombie producer.
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And other people who produce really commercial information.
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It's like commercially process food.
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This is Tyson's Any'Tizers.
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They're Dippin' Twists.
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Good for any time.
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And I don't know what the fuck they're made out of, man!
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And it's the same thing with information.
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If you think about it information and food
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are pretty similar.
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They have these food chains, right?
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So food goes from organic matter to vegetables, meats, to
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people, and facts go data, to wire services, to bloggers
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and distributors, people.
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At the top of both of these food chains are Zombies!
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And that's what we have to fix.
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So what I do is, I fight Zombies.
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What we do, is we get data out of government
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to empower people.
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Now here's a good example of some Zombies; Don't Steal
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from Medicare to Support Socialized Medicine.
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It's the equivalent of people saying "Brains.
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Brains" So, we take this data, right?
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This is every campaign contribution, not every one,
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but this is a cobalt base file of every campaign contribution
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that every member of Congress has ever received.
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And we make it so that people can easily say, that hey, maybe
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our health care system is messed up because of campaign
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contributions and lobbyists and stuff like that, right?
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So, this is TransparencyData.com where you
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can easily get all of the Nelson's campaign contributions
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at the State or Federal of level over the past 30 years
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and you can get API.
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You can do cool things with the it, like integrate it with
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Gmail, so you can see who is contributing.
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It does a look up for the sender of the email.
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It also checks for lobbyists, so you can be aware registered
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federal lobbyists that email you.
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So, in 4000BC, writing was a trade secret of
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a professional scribe.
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It was locked up and not given to people.
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And, I think something interesting has changed now.
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Instead of writing, it's truth that's a trade secret of
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professional scribes.
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And, it's up to developers to really bust down that barrier,
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because we have the power to change Washington, DC through
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giving people better access to the truth.
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Now these are currently truth-tellers.
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They're called "Bloggers" Well, on
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the left you have a Blogger, next the Blogger, and Social
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Media Expert and, then you have a Marketing Consultant and some
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dude who got poisoned with LSD or something like that.
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But developers can tell the truth through code.
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They can start using data to give people better access to
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the truth and build tools like for transparency data or tools
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on top of transparency data to give people access the
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sane, rational thought.
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You go to this web site here, the National Data Catalog, and
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say hey, maybe a mine exploded and you wanted to see the mine
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safety records of all of the United States.
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You can get that data right here and start saying, hey
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maybe Massey Energy isn't doing well by its employees, and
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is killing its employees.
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You can do the same thing with, say there's an oil spill.
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You can see where people are getting their oil from, and
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how much foreign oil we are actually dependent on.
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Then you can start tying all this data together.
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This is a web site that one of our grantees built called
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LittleSis.com that allows people to tie alll this data
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together, and build profiles.
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It's a mandatory Facebook of influential people.
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It's pretty awesome.
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So.
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That's a Zombie.
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So these tools help you fight these people, and make it so
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that your arms don't get chewed off by a pretty,
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blue eyed Zombie.
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So, one last thing, fighting Zombies makes you money.
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GPS, weather, all kinds of data initiatives coming from
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government have created massive economies, massive industries,
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and this isn't just a social cause, it's something much
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more significant than that.
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So, thank you very much.
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You guys have been great!
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Let's hear it for Brady.
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BRADY FORREST: And thank you very much, Clay.
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And now we're going to move away from DC.
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All the way back to Mountain Dew, and Seattle with the
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former Googler, the woman behind the original
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Web Master Central.
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Please welcome up Vanessa Fox, a seeker of truth.
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VANESSA FOX: Okay.
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Thank you, Brady.
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So, normally, we have these things in a pub, and you're
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all drunk and its awesome, and I'm so much better.
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But, so, since we're not in a pub today, we're going to find
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out the meaning of life.
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I checked Google first.
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The meaning of life, of course, they say it's 42, which used to
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be really awesome, but now with the movie coming out, a
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few years ago, everyone knows the answer is 42.
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If you do the Flicker search, you see that it's old hat.
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So, we're not cool anymore to really know anymore
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the answer 42.
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But they also think the meaning of life is Google,
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so that scared me.
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So, I thought that I would look for the meaning of life on
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Bing, because that's the decision engine.
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Sorry Google.
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They told me I should look for what's my dragon name, which
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lead me to a site to find a dragon name for my dog,
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horse, cat or child.
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That was very disturbing.
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I thought, perhaps that I instead, I would try Yahoo,
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another search engine.
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It told me to find the meaning of life on these
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3 places, in this order.
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And, the bible is the only one in lower case which I didn't
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know exactly what that meant.
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So I went to Twitter first and it actually pointed
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me to Facebook.
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And so, I thought, okay.
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And the meaning of life is Robert Pattinson looks like
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a foot, of Twilight fame.
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I didn't think this was really leading me in the direction
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I had been looking for.
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So, I thought I'd do another search on Facebook, What's
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the meaning of Life?
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It told me to YouTube, back to Google, right?
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The number 2 engine is YouTube.
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This is what YouTube said that the meaning of life was.
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This is actually disturbed me maybe just as much as Robert
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Patterson looks like a foot.
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So, I didn't learn the meaning of life, but what I did
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learn was that people are crazy on the internet.
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And, I was like, OK, maybe I'm just looking at
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the wrong thing.
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Maybe I just really need to know why are people on
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the internet so crazy?
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So, this is the next search that I did.
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And, what I found was that this.
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I do research a serious subject and what I found find is that
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the author would like to shoot the pope, or would like to do
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strange things to my unmentionable parts.
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And also, by the way, why do all the crazy people
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use the caps button?
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And these things seem to be an equal interest to this person.
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So, I thought, well, that's a good question?
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So, why do all crazy people use caps on the internet?
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And what I found was, does anyone have a good recipe
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for a red velvet cake.
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And, I was like, yeah, dude I love cake.
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I ended on this site, which with a bunch of people in a
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flame war about whether the Star Trek characters should
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really be on the cake because really, was he a navigator?
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And ended up with this guy saying, have you kissed a girl?
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Turn off caps-lock on your computer.
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So I thought I'm going to really go to the root of crazy
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people and ask them what the meaning of life is, which of
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course, lead me ChatRoulette.
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Then, I looked into Chatroulette, and I was
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like, you know, I'm not going after all.
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I don't need know the meaning of life that bad.
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So, instead that validated that people on the internet or crazy
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but also the other thing, of course, is that we
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all search, right?
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You've all been searching, and you found that people
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wanted to things to your unmentionable parts.
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So, we do 2.9 million searches a minute.
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We use major search engines for everything. 71% of us use major
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search engines for looking for health information.
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So, life or death.