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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, I had
the opportunity to sail for the first time.
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I will never forget
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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,
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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 hundred 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
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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
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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 non-stop 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 loved it, so much so
that within six months
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I decided to go around the world again,
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but this time not to race:
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to try to be the fastest person ever
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to sail solo non-stop 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 multi-hull.
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When we built her, no one had ever
made it solo non-stop
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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
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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
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in the Southern Ocean
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plunged into icy water,
thousands of miles away 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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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
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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 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 main sail 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
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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 3 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
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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 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 of
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.
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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.
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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.
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And I quickly realized it wasn't
just about global 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
a hundred 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 broad 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 had
absolutely no control over.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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and of course, cradle-to-cradle design.
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Materials would be defined
as either technical or biological,
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waste would be designed out entirely,
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and we would have a system
that could function
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absolutely in the long term.
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So what could this economy look like?
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Maybe we wouldn't buy light fittings,
but we'd pay for the service of light,
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and the manufacturers
would recover the materials
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and change the light fittings
when we had more efficient products.
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What if packaging was so non-toxic
it could dissolve in water
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and we could ultimately drink it?
It would never become waste.
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What if engines were re-manufacturable,
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and we could recover
the component materials
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and significantly reduce energy demand.
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What if we could recover components
from circuit boards, re-utilize them,
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and then fundamentally recover
the materials within them
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through a second stage?
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What if we could collect
food waste, human waste?
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What if we could turn that
into fertilizer, heat, energy,
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ultimately reconnecting nutrients systems
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and rebuilding natural capital?
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And cars, what we want is to move around.
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We don't need to own
the materials within them.
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Could cars become a service
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and provide us with
mobility in the future?
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All of this sounds amazing, but these
aren't just ideas, they're real today,
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and these lie at the forefront
of the circular economy.
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What lies before us is to expand them
and scale them up.
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So how would you shift
from linear to circular?
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Well, the team and I at the Foundation
thought you might want to work
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with the top universities in the world,
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with leading businesses within the world,
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with the biggest convening
platforms in the world,
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and with governments.
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We thought you might want to work with
the best analysts and as them the question
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"Can the circular economy decouple
growth from resource constraints?
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Is the circular economy able
to rebuild natural capital?
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Could the circular economy
replace current chemical fertilizer use?
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Yes, was the answer to the decoupling,
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but also yes, we could replace
current fertilizer use
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by a staggering 2.7 times.
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But what inspired me most
about the circular economy
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was its ability to inspire young people.
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When young people see the economy
through a circular lens,
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they see brand new opportunities
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on exactly the same horizon.
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They can use their creativity
and knowledge
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to rebuild the entire system,
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and it's there for the taking right now,
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and the faster we do this, the better.
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So could we achieve this
in their lifetimes?
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Is it actually possible?
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I believe yes.
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When you look at the lifetime of
my great grandfather, anything's possible.
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When he was born, there were only
25 cars in the world
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that had only just been invented.
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When he was 14, we flew
for the first time in history.
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Now there are 100,000 charter flights
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every single day.
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When he was 45, we built
the first computer.
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Many said it wouldn't catch on,
but it did, and just 20 years later
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we turned it into a microchip
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of which there will be thousands of
in this room today.
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Ten years before he died,
we built the first mobile phone.
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It wasn't that mobile, to be fair,
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but now it really is,
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and as my great grandfather
left this Earth, the Internet arrived.
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Now we can do anything,
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but more importantly,
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now we have a plan.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)