Ze Frank's web playroom

526,361 views ・ 2010-10-15

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:15
Every presentation needs this slide in it.
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(Laughter)
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It's beautiful, isn't it?
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Do you see?
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All the points, all the lines --
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it's incredible.
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It is the network;
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and in my case, the network has been important in media,
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because I get to connect to people.
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Isn't it amazing?
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Through that, I connect to people.
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And the way that I've been doing it
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has been multifaceted.
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For example, I get people to dress up their vacuum cleaners.
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(Laughter)
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I put together projects like Earth Sandwich,
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where I ask people
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to try and simultaneously place
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two pieces of bread
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perfectly opposite each other on the Earth.
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And people started laying bread in tribute,
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and eventually a team was able to do it
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between New Zealand and Spain.
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It's pretty incredible -- the video's online.
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Connecting to people in projects
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like YoungmeNowme for example.
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In YoungmeNowme, the audience was asked
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to find a childhood photograph of themselves
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and restage it as an adult.
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(Laughter)
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This is the same person --
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top photo, James, bottom photo, [Jennifer].
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Poignant.
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This was a Mother's Day gift.
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(Laughter)
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Particularly creepy.
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(Applause)
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(Laughter)
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My favorite of these photos, which I couldn't find,
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is there's a picture of a 30 year-old woman or so
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with a little baby on her lap,
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and the next photo is a 220-lb man
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with a tiny, little old lady peaking over his shoulder.
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But this project changed the way
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that I thought about connecting to people.
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This is project called Ray.
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And what happened was I was sent this piece of audio
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and had no idea who generated the audio.
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Somebody said, "You have to listen to this."
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And this is what came to me.
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Recording: Hi, my name is Ray,
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and on yesterday my daughter called me
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because she was stressed out
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because of things that were going on on her job
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that she felt was quite unfair.
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Being quite disturbed, she called for comfort,
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and I didn't really know what to tell her,
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because we have to deal with so much mess in our society.
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So I was led to write this song just for her,
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just to give her some encouragement
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while dealing with stress and pressures on her job.
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And I figured I'd put it on the Internet
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for all employees under stress
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to help you better deal with what you're going through on your job.
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Here's how the song goes.
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♫ I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫
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♫ Oh, I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫
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♫ Oh, if you don't leave me alone, ♫
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♫ you gonna have to send me home ♫
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♫ 'Cause I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫
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Now you might not be able to sing that out loud,
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but you can hum it to yourself, and you know what the words are.
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And let it give you some strength to get the next few moments on your job.
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All right. Stay strong. Peace.
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03:38
Ze Frank: So -- yeah.
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No, no, no, shush. We've got to go quickly.
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So I was so moved by this --
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this is incredible. This was connecting, right.
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This was, at a distance,
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realizing that someone was feeling something,
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wanting to affect them in a particular way,
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using media to do it, putting it online
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and realizing that there was a greater impact.
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This was incredible; this is what I wanted to do.
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So the first thing I thought of is we have to thank him.
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And I asked my audience, I said, "Listen to this piece of audio.
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We have to remix it. He's got a great voice.
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It's actually in the key of B flat.
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And have to do something with it."
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Hundreds of remixes came back -- lots of different attempts.
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One stood out in particular.
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It was done by a guy named Goose.
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Remix: ♫ I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫
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♫ Oh, I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫
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♫ Oh, if you don't leave me alone, ♫
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♫ You gonna have to send me home ♫
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♫ Cuz I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫
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♫ I'm about to whip some ♫ --
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ZF: Great, so it was incredible.
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That song -- (Applause) Thank you.
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So that song, somebody told me that it was at a baseball game
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in Kansas City.
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In the end,
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it was one of the top downloads
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on a whole bunch of music streaming services.
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And so I said, "Let's put this together in an album."
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And the audience came together, and they designed an album cover.
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And I said, "If you put it all on this, I'm going to deliver it to him,
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if you can figure out who this person is,"
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because all I had was his name -- Ray --
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and this little piece of audio
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and the fact that his daughter was upset.
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In two weeks, they found him.
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I received and email and it said,
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"Hi, I'm Ray.
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I heard you were looking for me."
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(Laughter)
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And I was like, "Yeah, Ray.
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It's been an interesting two weeks."
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And so I flew to St. Louis
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and met Ray,
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and he's a preacher --
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(Laughter)
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among other things.
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So but anyways, here's the thing --
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is it reminds me of this,
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which is a sign that you see in Amsterdam on every street corner.
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And it's sort of a metaphor for me for the virtual world.
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I look at this photo, and he seems really interested
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in what's going on with that button,
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but it doesn't seem like he is really that interested in crossing the street.
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(Laughter)
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And it makes me think of this.
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On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones,
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and it's easy to dismiss this
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as some sort of bad trend
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in human culture.
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But the truth is
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life is being lived there.
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When they smile --
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right, you've seen people stop --
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all of a sudden, life is being lived there,
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somewhere up in that weird, dense network.
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And this is it, right, to feel and be felt.
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It's the fundamental force
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that we're all after.
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We can build all sorts of environments
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to make it a little bit easier,
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but ultimately, what we're trying to do
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is really connect with one other person.
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And that's not always going to happen in physical spaces.
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It's also going to now happen in virtual spaces,
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and we have to get better at figuring that out.
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I think, of the people that build all this technology in the network,
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a lot of them aren't very good
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at connecting with people.
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This is kind of like something I used to do
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in third grade.
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(Laughter)
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So here's a series of projects
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over the last few years
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where I've been inspired by trying to figure out
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how to really facilitate close connection.
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Sometimes they're very, very simple things.
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A Childhood Walk, which is a project
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where I ask people to remember a walk
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that they used to take as a child over and over again
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that was sort of meaningless --
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like on the route to the bus stop, to a neighbor's house,
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and take it inside of Google Streetview.
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And I promise you,
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if you take that walk inside Google Streetview,
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you come to a moment
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where something comes back
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and hits you in the face.
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And I collected those moments --
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the photos inside Google Streetview
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and the memories, specifically.
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"Our conversation started with me saying, 'I'm bored,'
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and her replying, 'When I'm bored I eat pretzels.'
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I remember this distinctly because it came up a lot."
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"Right after he told me and my brother
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he was going to be separating from my mom,
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I remember walking to a convenience store
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and getting a cherry cola."
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"They used some of the morbidly artist footage,
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a close-up of Chad's shoes in the middle of the highway.
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I guess the shoes came off when he was hit.
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He slept over at my house once, and he left his pillow.
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It had 'Chad' written in magic marker on it.
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He died long after he left the pillow at my house,
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but we never got around to returning it."
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Sometimes they're a little bit more abstract.
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This is Pain Pack.
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Right after September 11th, last year,
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I was thinking about pain and the way that we disperse it,
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the way that we excise it from our bodies.
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So what I did is I opened up a hotline --
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a hotline where people could leave voicemails of their pain,
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not necessarily related to that event.
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And people called in and left messages like this.
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09:03
Recording: Okay, here's something.
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I'm not alone,
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and I am loved.
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I'm really fortunate.
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But sometimes I feel really lonely.
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And when I feel that way
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even the smallest act of kindness
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can make me cry.
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Like even people in convenience stores
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saying, "Have a nice day,"
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when they're accidentally looking me in the eye.
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ZF: So what I did was I took those voicemails,
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and with their permission, converted them to MP3s
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and distributed them to sound editors
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who created short sounds
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using just those voicemails.
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And those were then distributed to DJs
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who have made hundreds of songs
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using that source material.
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(Music)
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We don't have time to play much of it.
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You can look at it online.
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"From 52 to 48 with love"
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was a project around the time of the last election cycle,
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where McCain and Obama both,
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in their speeches after the election, talked about reconciliation,
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and I was like, "What the hell
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does that look like?"
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So I thought, "Well let's just give it a try.
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Let's have people hold up signs about reconciliation."
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And so some really nice things came together.
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"I voted blue. I voted red.
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Together, for our future."
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These are very, very cute little things right.
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Some came from the winning party.
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"Dear 48, I promise to listen to you, to fight for you, to respect you always."
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Some came from the party who had just lost.
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"From a 48 to a 52, may your party's leadership be as classy as you,
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but I doubt it."
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But the truth was that as this start becoming popular,
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a couple rightwing blogs and some message boards
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apparently found it to be a little patronizing,
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which I could also see.
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And so I started getting amazing amounts of hate mail,
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death threats even.
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And one guy in particular kept on writing me these pretty awful messages,
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and he was dressed as Batman.
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And he said, "I'm dressed as Batman to hide my identity."
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Just in case I thought the real Batman
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was coming after me;
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which actually made me feel a little better --
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like, "Phew, it's not him."
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So what I did --
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unfortunately, I was harboring all this kind of
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awful experience and this pain inside of me,
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and it started to eat away at my psyche.
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And I was protecting the project from it, I realized. I was protecting it --
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I didn't want this special, little group of photographs
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to get sullied in some way.
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So what I did, I took all those emails,
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and I put them together into something called Angrigami,
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which was an origami template
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made out of this sort of vile stuff.
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And I asked people to send me beautiful things
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made out of the Angrigami.
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(Laughter)
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But this was the emotional moment.
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One of my viewer's uncles died on a particular day
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and he chose to commemorate it with a piece of hate.
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It's amazing.
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The last thing I'm going to tell you about is a series of projects
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called Songs You Already Know,
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where the idea was,
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I was trying to figure out to address
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particular kinds of emotions with group projects.
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So one of them was fairly straightforward.
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A guy said that his daughter got scared at night
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and could I write a song for her, his daughter.
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And I said, "Oh yeah,
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I'll try to write a mantra that she can sing to herself
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to help herself go to sleep."
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And this was "Scared."
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(Video) ♫ This is a song that I sing when I'm scared of something ♫
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♫ I don't know why but it helps me get over it ♫
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♫ The words of the song just move me along ♫
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♫ And somehow I get over it ♫
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♫ At least I don't suck at life ♫
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♫ I keep on trying despite ♫
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♫ At least I don't suck at life ♫
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♫ I keep on trying despite ♫
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♫ This is a song that I sing when I'm scared of something ♫
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Okay, so I wrote that song, right. Thank you.
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So the nice thing was is he walked by his daughter's room at some point,
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and she actually was singing that song to herself.
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So I was like, "Awesome. This is great."
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And then I got this email. And there's a little bit of a back story to this.
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And I don't have much time.
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But the idea was that at one point
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I did a project called Facebook Me Equals You,
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where I wanted to experience what it was like
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to live as another person.
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So I asked for people's usernames and passwords to be sent to me.
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And I got a lot, like 30 in a half an hour.
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And I shut that part down.
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And I chose two people to be,
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and I asked them to send me descriptions
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of how to act as them on Facebook.
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One person sent me a very detailed description;
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the other person didn't.
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And the person who didn't, it turned out,
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had just moved to a new city and taken on a new job.
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So, you know, people were writing me and saying, "How's your new job?"
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I was like, "I don't know.
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Didn't know I had one."
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But anyway, this same person, Laura,
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ended up emailing me a little bit after that project.
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And I felt badly for not having done a good job.
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And she said, "I'm really anxious, I just moved to a new town, I have this new job,
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and I've just had this incredible amount of anxiety."
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So she had seen the "Scared" song and wondered if I could do something.
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So I asked her, "What does it feel like when you feel this way?"
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And she wrote a sort of descriptive set
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of what it felt like to have had this anxiety.
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And so what I decided to do.
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I said, "Okay, I'll think about it."
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And so quietly in the background, I started sending people this.
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(Audio) ♫ Hey ♫
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♫ You're okay ♫
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♫ You'll be fine ♫
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So I asked people
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whether they had basic audio capabilities,
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just so they could sing along to the song with headphones on,
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so I could just get their voices back.
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And this is the kind of thing that I got back.
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Recording: ♫ Hey ♫
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♫ You're okay ♫
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♫ You'll be fine ♫
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ZF: So that's one of the better ones, really.
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But what's awesome is, as I started getting more and more and more of them,
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all of a sudden I had 30, 40 voices from around the world.
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And when you put them together, something magical happens,
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something absolutely incredible happens,
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and all of a sudden I get a chorus from around the world.
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And what was really great is, I'm putting all this work together in the background,
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and Laura sent me a follow-up email because a good month had passed by.
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And she said, "I know you've forgotten about me.
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I just want to say thanks for even considering it."
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And then a few days later I sent her this.
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(Audio) ♫ Right now, it feels like I forgot to turn the light on ♫
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♫ And things that looked so good yesterday ♫
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♫ are now shades of gray ♫
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♫ And it seems like the world is spinning ♫
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♫ while I'm standing still ♫
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♫ Or maybe I am spinning I can't tell ♫
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♫ And then you say ♫
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♫ Hey ♫
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♫ You're okay ♫
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♫ You'll be fine ♫
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♫ Just breathe ♫
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♫ And now the words sing ♫
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♫ Hey ♫
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♫ You're okay ♫
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♫ You'll be fine ♫
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♫ Just breathe ♫
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♫ Now everybody sings ♫
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♫ Hey ♫
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17:08
♫ You're okay ♫
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17:11
♫ You'll be fine ♫
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17:15
♫ Just breathe ♫
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17:20
♫ Hey ♫
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17:22
♫ You're okay ♫
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17:26
♫ You'll be fine ♫
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17:30
♫ Just breathe ♫
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17:34
♫ Hey ♫
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17:37
♫ You're okay ♫
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17:41
♫ You'll be fine ♫
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17:44
♫ Just breathe ♫
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17:47
Thank you.
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17:49
(Applause)
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Original video on YouTube.com
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