WEBVTT

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I'm Craig and with a group
of beautiful friends that I love,

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and at this moment miss very much,
I run a small bookshop

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in the town of Oia, on the island
of Santorini in the south of Greece.

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And we do philosophy books,
and we do some Greek history

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and general non fiction,
we do travel logs and journals.

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We print our own books once in a while and
we celebrate tzatziki at every opportunity,

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and we feed it to people
on our terrace until they explode.

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We have readings
in the evenings in the shop

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and we make bonfires
on the terrace at night.

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But mostly we specialize in fiction.

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When the rare occasion does come,

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that someone offers to give me money
in exchange for a book and I perk up,

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they're generally putting a story
on the table and saying "I'd like this"

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and then more often than not,
they'll ask "What are you doing here?",

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"Who are you?" and sometimes
they'll ask "Do you take dollars?"

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or "Where are your copies
of 'Fifty shades of grey'?"

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(Laughter)

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(Greek): Bullshit

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(Laughter)
(Applause)

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And if I am in the mood
and if I've had a glass of wine

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or I'll offer a glass of wine
to the customer and we'll sit down and,

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I'll tell them a little bit of stories.

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And over the years we've had a thousand
tellings of the story over and over.

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And people come
and ask for our nativity story

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and we have a thousand alternations of it,
and to keep us awake and alert,

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and keep our muscle taught,
sometimes, we'll, just for fun,

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throw in little twists on the truth,
to see what we can slip by a customer

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that we're probably
never gonna see again.

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So I'll tell them that I was born
in Mississippi instead of Tennessee,

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or I'll tell them that I got to college
on a basketball scholarship

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or I'll tell them that I was one of the
founders of Facebook and watch them shake.

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And I mean, this is what we do,

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our stock and trade, honestly 75%
and more of our day is spent

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selling and telling
stories at the bookshop.

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And so, when I was invited here,
I had actually to spin and tell our story.

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I had to actually think for a minute,
because I wanted to make sure

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that I didn't mess up,
get the facts wrong.

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After a while, you start to dissociate yourself

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and the story becomes something
that you weren't even there.

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You remember it more
as a story that you've told,

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than a story that you've actually lived.

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So I came back to this instant
and then I thought OK,

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I should probably tell something
much more proximate to the truth here.

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But then I realized,
probably the quickest way

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to quickly tell that would be to base it

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on the most important lies
that we encountered,

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and that we told ourselves
to make this bookshop happen.

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So indulge me for a couple of minutes,

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and I'll give you the quick story of how
we did this or are doing this so far.

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The way that I'll set it up, so yeah,

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we start printing these books
in the back room of the shop,

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just on our own as a little money maker
on the side to make ends meet,

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because we've always wanted to do it.

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And so we were looking at old titles
in the public domain

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of favourite authors of ours,
and one of the fellows in our crew,

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Chris Bloomfield, that's Bloomfield
with two O's he wanted me to mention,

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Chris Bloomfield came across this
old essay that this very handsome man,

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Mark Twain, wrote for a speech competition
in Connecticut back in the 1880s I believe.

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He did not win the prize,
but it's a beautiful little essay.

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And there is this one little part of it
that I'll just launch off of it

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and if you want to read along with me,
it says,

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"Lying is universal. We all do it."

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And we can argue that later, but I think
everyone, we're on the same team here.

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"Therefore, the wise thing is for us
to diligently train ourselves

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to lie thoughtfully, juduciously;
to lie with a good object,

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and not an evil one; to lie
for others' advantage, and not our own;

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to lie healingly, charitably, humanely,
not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously;

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to lie gracefully and graciously,
not awkwardly and clumsily…

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Then shall we be rid of the rank
pestilent truth that is rotting the land;

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then shall we be great
and good and beautiful."

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And so we looked at each other
and we said "Yeah, we're doing this, yeah."

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(Laughter)

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So let me tell you a little
about the best lies of all,

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and give you a sense of how
we came to be here from far away.

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I first came to Santorini
by chance, by coincidence,

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got on the first boat out of Pireaus,

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when I was on holiday
with my friend Oliver.

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This was back in 2002,
we came to this island, we sat down,

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we poured ourselves a glass of wine,
poured some olive oil over some tomatoes,

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and basically sat on our terrace
and stared out

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with our mouths slightly gape
for several days

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and then on about the fourth
or the fifth day we were there,

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we ran out of books to read
and there was no bookshop.

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So, we did some drinking instead.

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And we were stumbling back
from a restaurant one night

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and I just looked over at Oliver and said,

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"Oliver, we gotta open a bookshop,
so that nobody else has to do this",

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and he said "That's a great idea,
we'll call it Atlantis books",

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and I said "That's not a very good name,
but we'll worry about that tomorrow."

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And we woke up the next morning
and I said "Bookshop!",

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and he said, "We're sober now",
and I said, "No, no, no, bookshop."

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And so we went back to Athens,

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we went to the commercial services
office at the Embassy,

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and we met this lady, Eleni,

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(Laughter)

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and we said, "Can a couple of Americans
open a bookshop in Greece?"

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and she looked at me and she said
(Greek): "It will be easy".

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(Laughter)

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It will be easy.

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You know, you go to the tax office
and they give you a paper with the stamp

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and then you go
to the cash machine store

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and you buy a cash machine
and you put it on your desk.

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And (Greek) here you go,
you are a bookstore.

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and so we said "Great, great"
and it was such a good answer

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and we ran with it so fast that we didn't
even think to ask her a second opinion,

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because when you get an answer
that's that good,

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you're just going to run with it.

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So we went back and we went about
the business of graduating from university

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and got together
the best people that we knew,

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the most incredible group of friends
and convinced them to come along with us

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and one girl that during that time
I happen to fall in love with,

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and told her that I was going to build her
a bookshop at an island

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in the south of Greece.

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And she said, "OK, if you do it, I'll come

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and I'll make orange juice
for you in the mornings",

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and I said, "Great, great."

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So we got this crew together,
we took a van

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from Cambridge, England, Christmas 2003

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and we packed up the van
and drove it across the continent

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and across the Alps and down to Greece
and we got to the tax office.

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And they said (Greek):
"It's not going to be easy".

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(Laughter)
(Applause)

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So that's another long and much more
horrifying TED talk to give you,

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all the details on that.
We're on the same team here clearly.

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(Laughter)

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So we gridded our teeth,
and I sort of slouched

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like in that picture
for several months going through

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and, you know, in the meantime
we met the locals and the community.

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We introduced ourselves to them,

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and we said, "We are going to open
a bookstore" and they believed us,

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and they start treating us
like booksellers.

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And so we found
this hallucination of a building,

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beneath the castle at the edge of town,
this old Venetian castle.

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And we went to the landlord
and we said, "We want this building",

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and he said "I will rent it to you,
but I will charge you way too much,

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and then at the end of the year,
I will kick you out

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so that I can build presidential suites",

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and we said, "OK, fine, we'll take it,
it's too good to pass out."

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And we're going do such a great job
the first year

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that we're going to melt his heart

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and it's a wonderful life all over again
and we'll be fine.

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And even if it doesn't work,
if we're going to do it just once off,

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and it's going to die anyhow, this is
the perfect place to have the experiment.

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So, we got this building,
we adopted a dog and a cat,

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we started putting up some shelves,
we started building some tables,

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we got an old fisherman's boat
and put it on the terrace.

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And our friends started coming, because
they heard that we actually had a place.

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And I started writing
their names on the wall

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just so we can keep track
of who is passing through.

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If you can see there, that's just the very
inception of that back in the years.

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And we got things going,
and we were ready to go.

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And by Easter time more and more
of them where coming.

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We had Easter Eve, we were ready to go
and our shop was very nearly there.

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And we were laughing about how
this was really gonna happen

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and that some day we were going
to have beautiful kids, like these,

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and they were going
to run the shop for us.

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And that first summer was glorious
and people came and we had a blast

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and we sold good books.

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And an old drinking buddy of mine
from Paris, this fellow Jeremy Mercer,

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was asked to write an article
for the Guardian

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about his ten favorite bookshops,

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and on a lark he put us as his favourite.

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And it turns out that journalists like
to copy what they read on the internet,

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because soon we saw
ourselves popping up

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on all these other lists
of the ten best bookshops in the world.

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That's the only reason,
because I had this one friend,

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who wrote something in the Guardian,
it comes up

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and that's why everyone believes it.
Turns out we were just lucky.


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(Laughter)
(Applause)

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So, notice that there was
no beautiful girl there,

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because in the time that it took
to raise that money and motivation

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to actually get it going, she had fallen
in love with someone else,

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and got off and I didn't know what to end.

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We were getting close
to the end of the year,

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we could hear the footsteps
of the landlord, coming closer and closer.

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And we were going to go home,
and then another beautiful girl walked in

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and I just completely forgot about
anybody else who I had ever seen.

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And I said we were going to fight,
we're going to come back.

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We were going to find,
we were going to built another one.

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I'm going to build it for her.

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She is the one that
I was going to build it for all along.

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(Audience): Bravo!
(Applause)

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And then the landlord
came and kicked us out.

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(Laughter)

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And the next winter, so over the winter
we found another place,

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that we haven't even noticed
the year before, this little dingy place.

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And we rented that and we started
painting and bashing down walls,

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and deliberating where we're going
to put the new shelves.

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and bashing down more rocks.

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You have to be ambitious to do
this kind of thing once by hand,

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but you go a little bit crazy
the second time it turns out

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and by Easter year two we had a new shop,
and the books were better,

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and they were more of them
and we sit upon our terrace,

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and we began to cruise,
and we sold our books.

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And we got a new cat
and we put the cat to work and we...

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(Laughter)
(Applause)

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We got a crew to start coming back,

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and Chris was holding court
in the back room, there he is.

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And we served up some
more tzatziki, as we do.

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And we have more readings
and Chris played his cello.

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And we had bonfires in the evening
and we met new friends.

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And we danced among the bookshelves
in the evenings until the sun came up.

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And we laughed and we argued about
which was the most beautiful bookjacket.

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And we pontificated and we watched
as things got a bit hairier on 2008-2009.

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Since then it's been a series
of us trying to do

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whatever we could creatively
to stay alive,

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as I'm sure many of you can relate.

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And somehow every year we have
this conversation "Is this the end?"

00:12:34.286 --> 00:12:38.006
And we say "Maybe it is" and the we say
"Well, what can we do?" and we wait.

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I think it's since 2002 when we first
came up with this idea.

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We said "We're just going to run with this
until there is a wall that we bash into",

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and we haven't bashed into it yet.

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We started printing our own books
in the back room of the shop like I said

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and that's gone larger and
that's helped to supplement where,

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we are figuring any sort of ways
that we can, to streamline our operation,

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to find new and better and more beautiful
and rarer books and it keeps us busy.

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And we're still laughing about maybe
our kids will run it some day.

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So, I would say, that in these days,
if you find yourselves in the situation

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that we're in, it's now
the end of the tourist season

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and I'm looking at the books
and I'm going to go back to Santorini

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in a couple of days,

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and take a look at where
we are at the end of the year,

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and I'm gonna hold my breath,

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and hope that we can pay the rent
to get through to next spring.

00:13:36.464 --> 00:13:41.727
And, I believe, I'm gonna tell myself
that we're going to do it.

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We're going to keep lying
gracefully to ourselves,

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and we're going to run
with these graceful lies

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that women like Eleni
are going to keep telling us,

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because if she hadn't lied
to us to our face,

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this would never have happened.

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So I would say that. Let us lie
gracefully a little bit more

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and watch the people that come
and start to believe your story,

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because that spiral over the years grows
and continues to grow.

00:14:17.885 --> 00:14:26.504
And we had this spiral
that's on the roof of the building,

00:14:26.504 --> 00:14:28.676
and we don't know how we're going
to keep everything underneath,

00:14:28.676 --> 00:14:31.127
but there is fellow Henry David Thoreau,
another handsome man,

00:14:31.127 --> 00:14:35.704
who said "If you build castles in the air,
your work need not be lost;

00:14:35.704 --> 00:14:38.991
that is where they should be.
Now build foundations under them."

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And that's what we're doing and if you
happen to find yourself

00:14:43.631 --> 00:14:50.415
in a magical place, on a magical land,
in some strange and difficult times,

00:14:50.415 --> 00:14:52.136
maybe it's time to believe
a few of those lies,

00:14:52.136 --> 00:14:56.381
maybe it's time to look at those castles
in the air and keep them there,

00:14:56.381 --> 00:14:58.289
and keep building the foundation
under them.

00:14:58.289 --> 00:15:04.474
Because you remember that fellow Oliver,
that came on that first trip with me,

00:15:04.474 --> 00:15:09.319
he actually left out the first year.

00:15:09.319 --> 00:15:14.164
He met a girl the first year
and he took her home.

00:15:14.164 --> 00:15:19.010
And they went back and they got married
and on the 4th of January 2012, this year,

00:15:19.010 --> 00:15:27.391
eight years to the day, after
we first landed on the island of Santorini...

00:15:28.838 --> 00:15:35.174
There is Oliver and there
is Annie Palmawise, they had a baby.

00:15:35.174 --> 00:15:40.330
So if we can hold on for 18 more years,
she can run the show for us.

00:15:40.330 --> 00:15:42.757
I hope we stick around,
I hope to see you soon.

00:15:42.757 --> 00:15:49.006
(Applause)