WEBVTT

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When you're a child,

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anything and everything is possible.

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The challenge, so often,
is hanging on to that as we grow up.

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And as a four-year-old,

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I had the opportunity
to sail for the first time.

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I will never forget
the excitement as we closed the coast.

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I will never forget

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the feeling of adventure
as I climbed on board the boat

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and stared into her tiny cabin
for the first time.

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But the most amazing feeling
was the feeling of freedom,

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the feeling that I felt
when we hoisted her sails.

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As a four-year-old child,

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it was the greatest sense of freedom
that I could ever imagine.

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I made my mind up there and then
that one day, somehow,

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I was going to sail around the world.

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So I did what I could in my life
to get closer to that dream.

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Age 10, it was saving my school
dinner money change.

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Every single day for eight years,
I had mashed potato and baked beans,

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which cost 4p each, and gravy was free.

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Every day I would pile up the change
on the top of my money box,

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and when that pile reached a pound,
I would drop it in

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and cross off one of the 100 squares
I'd drawn on a piece of paper.

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Finally, I bought a tiny dinghy.

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I spent hours sitting on it in the garden
dreaming of my goal.

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I read every book I could on sailing,

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and then eventually,
having been told by my school

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I wasn't clever enough to be a vet,

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left school age 17 to begin
my apprenticeship in sailing.

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So imagine how it felt
just four years later

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to be sitting in a boardroom

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in front of someone who I knew
could make that dream come true.

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I felt like my life
depended on that moment,

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and incredibly, he said yes.

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And I could barely contain my excitement
as I sat in that first design meeting

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designing a boat
on which I was going to sail

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solo nonstop around the world.

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From that first meeting
to the finish line of the race,

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it was everything I'd ever imagined.

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Just like in my dreams, there were
amazing parts and tough parts.

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We missed an iceberg by 20 feet.

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Nine times, I climbed to the top
of her 90-foot mast.

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We were blown on our side
in the Southern Ocean.

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But the sunsets, the wildlife,
and the remoteness

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were absolutely breathtaking.

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After three months at sea, age just 24,

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I finished in second position.

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I'd loved it, so much so
that within six months

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I decided to go around the world again,
but this time not in a race:

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to try to be the fastest person ever
to sail solo nonstop around the world.

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Now for this, I needed a different craft:

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bigger, wider, faster, more powerful.

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Just to give that boat some scale,
I could climb inside her mast

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all the way to the top.

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Seventy-five foot long, 60 foot wide.

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I affectionately called her Moby.

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She was a multihull.

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When we built her, no one had ever
made it solo nonstop

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around the world in one,
though many had tried,

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but whilst we built her, a Frenchman
took a boat 25 percent bigger than her

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and not only did he make it,
but he took the record from 93 days

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right down to 72.

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The bar was now much, much higher.

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And these boats were exciting to sail.

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This was a training sail
off the French coast.

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This I know well because I was one
of the five crew members on board.

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Five seconds is all it took
from everything being fine

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to our world going black
as the windows were thrust underwater,

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and that five seconds goes quickly.

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Just see how far below
those guys the sea is.

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Imagine that alone
in the Southern Ocean

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plunged into icy water,
thousands of miles away from land.

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It was Christmas Day.

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I was forging into the Southern Ocean
underneath Australia.

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The conditions were horrendous.

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I was approaching a part in the ocean

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which was 2,000 miles away
from the nearest town.

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The nearest land was Antarctica,
and the nearest people

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would be those manning
the European Space Station above me.

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(Laughter)

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You really are in the middle of nowhere.

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If you need help,

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and you're still alive,

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it takes four days
for a ship to get to you

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and then four days for that ship
to get you back to port.

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No helicopter can reach you out there,

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and no plane can land.

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We are forging ahead of a huge storm.

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Within it, there was 80 knots of wind,

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which was far too much wind
for the boat and I to cope with.

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The waves were already 40 to 50 feet high,

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and the spray from the breaking crests

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was blown horizontally
like snow in a blizzard.

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If we didn't sail fast enough,
we'd be engulfed by that storm,

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and either capsized or smashed to pieces.

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We were quite literally
hanging on for our lives

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and doing so on a knife edge.

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The speed I so desperately needed
brought with it danger.

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We all know what it's like driving a car
20 miles an hour, 30, 40.

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It's not too stressful.
We can concentrate.

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We can turn on the radio.

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Take that 50, 60, 70, accelerate through
to 80, 90, 100 miles an hour.

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Now you have white knuckles
and you're gripping the steering wheel.

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Now take that car off road at night

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and remove the windscreen wipers,
the windscreen,

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the headlights and the brakes.

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That's what it's like
in the Southern Ocean.

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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You could imagine

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it would be quite difficult
to sleep in that situation,

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even as a passenger.

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But you're not a passenger.

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You're alone on a boat
you can barely stand up in,

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and you have to make
every single decision on board.

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I was absolutely exhausted,
physically and mentally.

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Eight sail changes in 12 hours.

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The mainsail weighed
three times my body weight,

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and after each change,

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I would collapse on the floor
soaked with sweat

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with this freezing Southern Ocean air
burning the back of my throat.

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But out there, those lowest of the lows

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are so often contrasted
with the highest of the highs.

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A few days later, we came out
of the back of the low.

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Against all odds, we'd been able
to drive ahead of the record

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within that depression.

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The sky cleared, the rain stopped,

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and our heartbeat, the monstrous
seas around us were transformed

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into the most beautiful moonlit mountains.

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It's hard to explain, but you enter
a different mode when you head out there.

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Your boat is your entire world,

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and what you take with you
when you leave is all you have.

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If I said to you all now,
"Go off into Vancouver

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and find everything you will need for
your survival for the next three months,"

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that's quite a task.

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That's food, fuel, clothes,

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even toilet roll and toothpaste.

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That's what we do,

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and when we leave we manage it

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down to the last drop of diesel
and the last packet of food.

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No experience in my life

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could have given me a better understanding
of the definition of the word "finite."

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What we have out there is all we have.

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There is no more.

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And never in my life had I ever
translated that definition of finite

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that I'd felt on board
to anything outside of sailing

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until I stepped off the boat at
the finish line having broken that record.

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(Applause)

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Suddenly I connected the dots.

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Our global economy is no different.

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It's entirely dependent
on finite materials

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we only have once
in the history of humanity.

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And it was a bit like seeing something
you weren't expecting under a stone

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and having two choices:

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I either put that stone to one side

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and learn more about it,
or I put that stone back

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and I carry on with my dream job
of sailing around the world.

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I chose the first.

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I put it to one side and I began
a new journey of learning,

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speaking to chief executives,
experts, scientists, economists

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to try to understand just how
our global economy works.

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And my curiosity took me
to some extraordinary places.

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This photo was taken in the burner
of a coal-fired power station.

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I was fascinated by coal,
fundamental to our global energy needs,

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but also very close to my family.

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My great-grandfather was a coal miner,

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and he spent 50 years
of his life underground.

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This is a photo of him,
and when you see that photo,

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you see someone from another era.

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No one wears trousers
with a waistband quite that high

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in this day and age. (Laughter)

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But yet, that's me
with my great-grandfather,

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and by the way, they are not
his real ears. (Laughter)

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We were close. I remember sitting on
his knee listening to his mining stories.

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He talked of the camaraderie underground,

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and the fact that the miners used to save
the crusts of their sandwiches

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to give to the ponies
they worked with underground.

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It was like it was yesterday.

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And on my journey of learning,

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I went to the World
Coal Association website,

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and there in the middle
of the homepage, it said,

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"We have about 118 years of coal left."

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And I thought to myself, well,
that's well outside my lifetime,

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and a much greater figure
than the predictions for oil.

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But I did the math, and I realized
that my great-grandfather

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had been born exactly 118 years
before that year,

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and I sat on his knee
until I was 11 years old,

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and I realized it's nothing

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in time, nor in history.

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And it made me make a decision
I never thought I would make:

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to leave the sport
of solo sailing behind me

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and focus on the greatest challenge
I'd ever come across:

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the future of our global economy.

NOTE Paragraph

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And I quickly realized it wasn't
just about energy.

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It was also materials.

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In 2008, I picked up a scientific study

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looking at how many years we have

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of valuable materials
to extract from the ground:

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copper, 61; tin, zinc, 40; silver, 29.

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These figures couldn't be exact,
but we knew those materials were finite.

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We only have them once.

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And yet, our speed that we've used
these materials has increased rapidly,

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exponentially.

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With more people in the world
with more stuff,

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we've effectively seen
100 years of price declines

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in those basic commodities
erased in just 10 years.

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And this affects all of us.

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It's brought huge volatility in prices,

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so much so that in 2011,

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your average European car manufacturer

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saw a raw material price increase

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of 500 million Euros,

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wiping away half their operating profits

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through something they have
absolutely no control over.

NOTE Paragraph

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And the more I learned, the more
I started to change my own life.

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I started traveling less,
doing less, using less.

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It felt like actually doing less
was what we had to do.

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But it sat uneasy with me.

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It didn't feel right.

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It felt like we were
buying ourselves time.

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We were eking things out a bit longer.

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Even if everybody changed,
it wouldn't solve the problem.

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It wouldn't fix the system.

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It was vital in the transition,
but what fascinated me was,

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in the transition to what?
What could actually work?

NOTE Paragraph

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It struck me that the system itself,
the framework within which we live,

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is fundamentally flawed,

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and I realized ultimately

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that our operating system,
the way our economy functions,

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the way our economy's been built,
is a system in itself.

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At sea, I had to understand
complex systems.

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I had to take multiple inputs,

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I had to process them,

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and I had to understand the system to win.

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I had to make sense of it.

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And as I looked at our global economy,
I realized it too is that system,

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but it's a system that effectively
can't run in the long term.

NOTE Paragraph

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And I realized we've been perfecting
what's effectively a linear economy

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for 150 years,

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where we take a material
out of the ground,

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we make something out of it,
and then ultimately

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that product gets thrown away,
and yes, we do recycle some of it,

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but more an attempt to get out
what we can at the end,

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not by design.

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It's an economy that fundamentally
can't run in the long term,

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and if we know that we
have finite materials,

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why would we build an economy
that would effectively use things up,

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that would create waste?

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Life itself has existed
for billions of years

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and has continually adapted
to use materials effectively.

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It's a complex system,
but within it, there is no waste.

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Everything is metabolized.

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It's not a linear economy
at all, but circular.

NOTE Paragraph

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And I felt like the child in the garden.

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For the first time on this new journey,
I could see exactly where we were headed.

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If we could build an economy that would
use things rather than use them up,

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we could build a future that really
could work in the long term.

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I was excited.

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This was something to work towards.

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We knew exactly where we were headed.
We just had to work out how to get there,

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and it was exactly with this in mind

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that we created the Ellen MacArthur
Foundation in September 2010.

NOTE Paragraph

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Many schools of thought fed our thinking
and pointed to this model:

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industrial symbiosis, performance economy,
sharing economy, biomimicry,

00:13:03.968 --> 00:13:06.724
and of course, cradle-to-cradle design.

00:13:06.894 --> 00:13:10.579
Materials would be defined
as either technical or biological,

00:13:10.579 --> 00:13:13.600
waste would be designed out entirely,

00:13:13.600 --> 00:13:16.112
and we would have a system
that could function

00:13:16.112 --> 00:13:18.294
absolutely in the long term.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:18.294 --> 00:13:20.361
So what could this economy look like?

00:13:21.151 --> 00:13:25.089
Maybe we wouldn't buy light fittings,
but we'd pay for the service of light,

00:13:25.089 --> 00:13:27.532
and the manufacturers
would recover the materials

00:13:27.532 --> 00:13:30.693
and change the light fittings
when we had more efficient products.

00:13:30.693 --> 00:13:33.990
What if packaging was so nontoxic
it could dissolve in water

00:13:33.990 --> 00:13:37.102
and we could ultimately drink it?
It would never become waste.

00:13:37.102 --> 00:13:39.215
What if engines were re-manufacturable,

00:13:39.215 --> 00:13:41.490
and we could recover
the component materials

00:13:41.490 --> 00:13:43.720
and significantly reduce energy demand.

00:13:43.720 --> 00:13:47.160
What if we could recover components
from circuit boards, reutilize them,

00:13:47.160 --> 00:13:49.823
and then fundamentally recover
the materials within them

00:13:49.823 --> 00:13:51.225
through a second stage?

00:13:51.225 --> 00:13:53.517
What if we could collect
food waste, human waste?

00:13:53.517 --> 00:13:56.698
What if we could turn that
into fertilizer, heat, energy,

00:13:56.698 --> 00:13:59.694
ultimately reconnecting nutrients systems

00:13:59.694 --> 00:14:02.805
and rebuilding natural capital?

00:14:02.805 --> 00:14:05.707
And cars -- what we want
is to move around.

00:14:05.707 --> 00:14:08.350
We don't need to own
the materials within them.

00:14:08.350 --> 00:14:09.989
Could cars become a service

00:14:09.989 --> 00:14:12.543
and provide us with
mobility in the future?

00:14:13.033 --> 00:14:17.230
All of this sounds amazing, but these
aren't just ideas, they're real today,

00:14:17.230 --> 00:14:19.950
and these lie at the forefront
of the circular economy.

00:14:19.950 --> 00:14:24.454
What lies before us is to expand them
and scale them up.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:24.454 --> 00:14:27.429
So how would you shift
from linear to circular?

00:14:27.899 --> 00:14:31.195
Well, the team and I at the foundation
thought you might want to work

00:14:31.195 --> 00:14:33.069
with the top universities in the world,

00:14:33.069 --> 00:14:35.089
with leading businesses within the world,

00:14:35.089 --> 00:14:37.437
with the biggest convening
platforms in the world,

00:14:37.437 --> 00:14:38.439
and with governments.

00:14:38.439 --> 00:14:41.059
We thought you might want
to work with the best analysts

00:14:41.059 --> 00:14:42.313
and ask them the question,

00:14:42.313 --> 00:14:45.514
"Can the circular economy decouple
growth from resource constraints?

00:14:45.514 --> 00:14:49.136
Is the circular economy able
to rebuild natural capital?

00:14:49.136 --> 00:14:52.781
Could the circular economy
replace current chemical fertilizer use?"

00:14:52.781 --> 00:14:55.127
Yes was the answer to the decoupling,

00:14:55.127 --> 00:14:58.145
but also yes, we could replace
current fertilizer use

00:14:58.145 --> 00:15:01.930
by a staggering 2.7 times.

00:15:02.690 --> 00:15:05.250
But what inspired me most
about the circular economy

00:15:05.250 --> 00:15:08.239
was its ability to inspire young people.

00:15:08.779 --> 00:15:11.914
When young people see the economy
through a circular lens,

00:15:11.914 --> 00:15:16.450
they see brand new opportunities
on exactly the same horizon.

00:15:16.488 --> 00:15:19.093
They can use their creativity
and knowledge

00:15:19.093 --> 00:15:21.480
to rebuild the entire system,

00:15:21.480 --> 00:15:23.593
and it's there for the taking right now,

00:15:23.593 --> 00:15:26.049
and the faster we do this, the better.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:26.049 --> 00:15:29.119
So could we achieve this
in their lifetimes?

00:15:29.119 --> 00:15:31.255
Is it actually possible?

00:15:31.255 --> 00:15:32.765
I believe yes.

00:15:33.105 --> 00:15:36.944
When you look at the lifetime of
my great-grandfather, anything's possible.

00:15:37.574 --> 00:15:41.310
When he was born, there were only
25 cars in the world;

00:15:41.310 --> 00:15:43.740
they had only just been invented.

00:15:43.740 --> 00:15:47.671
When he was 14, we flew
for the first time in history.

00:15:47.671 --> 00:15:50.160
Now there are 100,000 charter flights

00:15:50.160 --> 00:15:52.106
every single day.

00:15:52.106 --> 00:15:56.100
When he was 45, we built
the first computer.

00:15:56.100 --> 00:15:59.257
Many said it wouldn't catch on,
but it did, and just 20 years later

00:15:59.257 --> 00:16:01.278
we turned it into a microchip

00:16:01.278 --> 00:16:05.480
of which there will be thousands
in this room here today.

00:16:05.480 --> 00:16:08.359
Ten years before he died,
we built the first mobile phone.

00:16:08.359 --> 00:16:10.333
It wasn't that mobile, to be fair,

00:16:10.333 --> 00:16:12.307
but now it really is,

00:16:12.307 --> 00:16:16.277
and as my great-grandfather
left this Earth, the Internet arrived.

00:16:16.277 --> 00:16:18.390
Now we can do anything,

00:16:18.390 --> 00:16:19.670
but more importantly,

00:16:19.670 --> 00:16:21.985
now we have a plan.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:21.985 --> 00:16:23.990
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:24.640 --> 00:16:33.281
(Applause)