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My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously,

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on a collective level.

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And what I mean by that, it's the behaviors

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that we're in denial about,

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and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness.

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And as individuals, we all do these things, all the time, everyday.

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It's like when you're mean to your wife

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because you're mad at somebody else.

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Or when you drink a little too much at a party, just out of anxiety.

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Or when you overeat because your feelings are hurt, or whatever.

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And when we do these kind of things,

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when 300 million people do unconscious behaviors,

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then it can add up to a catastrophic consequence

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that nobody wants, and no one intended.

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And that's what I look at with my photographic work.

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This is an image I just recently completed, that is --

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when you stand back at a distance,

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it looks like some kind of neo-Gothic, cartoon image

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of a factory spewing out pollution.

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And as you get a little bit closer,

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it starts looking like lots of pipes, like maybe a chemical plant,

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or a refinery, or maybe a hellish freeway interchange.

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And as you get all the way up close,

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you realize that it's actually made of lots and lots of plastic cups.

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And in fact, this is one million plastic cups,

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which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights

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in the United States every six hours.

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We use four million cups a day on airline flights,

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and virtually none of them are reused or recycled.

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They just don't do that in that industry.

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Now, that number is dwarfed

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by the number of paper cups we use every day,

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and that is 40 million cups a day for hot beverages,

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most of which is coffee.

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I couldn't fit 40 million cups on a canvas,

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but I was able to put 410,000. That's what 410,000 cups looks like.

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That's 15 minutes of our cup consumption.

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And if you could actually stack up that many cups in real life,

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that's the size it would be.

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And there's an hour's worth of our cups.

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And there's a day's worth of our cups.

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You can still see the little people way down there.

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That's as high as a 42-story building,

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and I put the Statue of Liberty in there as a scale reference.

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Speaking of justice, there's another phenomenon going on in our culture

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that I find deeply troubling, and that is that America, right now,

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has the largest percentage of its population in prison

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of any country on Earth.

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One out of four people, one out of four humans in prison

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are Americans, imprisoned in our country.

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And I wanted to show the number.

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The number is 2.3 million Americans were incarcerated in 2005.

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And that's gone up since then, but we don't have the numbers yet.

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So, I wanted to show 2.3 million prison uniforms,

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and in the actual print of this piece,

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each uniform is the size of a nickel on its edge.

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They're tiny. They're barely visible as a piece of material,

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and to show 2.3 million of them required a canvas

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that was larger than any printer in the world would print.

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And so I had to divide it up into multiple panels

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that are 10 feet tall by 25 feet wide.

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This is that piece installed in a gallery in New York --

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those are my parents looking at the piece.

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(Laughter)

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Every time I look at this piece,

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I always wonder if my mom's whispering to my dad,

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"He finally folded his laundry."

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(Laughter)

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I want to show you some pieces now that are about addiction.

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And this particular one is about cigarette addiction.

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I wanted to make a piece that shows the actual number of Americans

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who die from cigarette smoking.

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More than 400,000 people die in the United States every year

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from smoking cigarettes.

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And so, this piece is made up of lots and lots of boxes of cigarettes.

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And, as you slowly step back,

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you see that it's a painting by Van Gogh, called "Skull with Cigarette."

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It's a strange thing to think about, that on 9/11,

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when that tragedy happened, 3,000 Americans died.

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And do you remember the response?

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It reverberated around the world,

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and will continue to reverberate through time.

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It will be something that we talk about in 100 years.

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And yet on that same day, 1,100 Americans died from smoking.

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And the day after that, another 1,100 Americans died from smoking.

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And every single day since then, 1,100 Americans have died.

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And today, 1,100 Americans are dying from cigarette smoking.

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And we aren't talking about it -- we dismiss it.

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The tobacco lobby, it's too strong.

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We just dismiss it out of our consciousness.

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And knowing what we know about the destructive power of cigarettes,

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we continue to allow our children, our sons and daughters,

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to be in the presence of the influences that start them smoking.

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And this is what the next piece is about.

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This is just lots and lots of cigarettes: 65,000 cigarettes,

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which is equal to the number of teenagers

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who will start smoking this month, and every month in the U.S.

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More than 700,000 children in the United States aged 18 and under

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begin smoking every year.

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One more strange epidemic in the United States

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that I want to acquaint you with

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is this phenomenon of abuse and misuse of prescription drugs.

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This is an image I've made out of lots and lots of Vicodin.

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Well, actually, I only had one Vicodin

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that I scanned lots and lots of times.

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(Laughter)

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And so, as you stand back, you see 213,000 Vicodin pills,

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which is the number of hospital emergency room visits

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yearly in the United States,

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attributable to abuse and misuse of prescription painkillers

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and anti-anxiety medications.

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One-third of all drug overdoses in the U.S. --

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and that includes cocaine, heroin, alcohol, everything --

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one-third of drug overdoses are prescription medications.

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A strange phenomenon.

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This is a piece that I just recently completed

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about another tragic phenomenon. And that is the phenomenon,

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this growing obsession we have with breast augmentation surgery.

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384,000 women, American women, last year

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went in for elective breast augmentation surgery.

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It's rapidly becoming the most popular high school graduation gift,

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given to young girls who are about to go off to college.

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So, I made this image out of Barbie dolls,

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and so, as you stand back you see this kind of floral pattern,

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and as you get all the way back, you see 32,000 Barbie dolls,

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which represents the number of breast augmentation surgeries

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that are performed in the U.S. each month.

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The vast majority of those are on women under the age of 21.

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And strangely enough, the only plastic surgery

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that is more popular than breast augmentation is liposuction,

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and most of that is being done by men.

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Now, I want to emphasize that these are just examples.

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I'm not holding these out as being the biggest issues.

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They're just examples.

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And the reason that I do this, it's because I have this fear

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that we aren't feeling enough as a culture right now.

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There's this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment.

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We've lost our sense of outrage, our anger and our grief

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about what's going on in our culture right now,

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what's going on in our country,

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the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world.

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They've gone missing; these feelings have gone missing.

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Our cultural joy, our national joy is nowhere to be seen.

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And one of the causes of this, I think,

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is that as each of us attempts to build this new kind of worldview,

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this holoptical worldview, this holographic image

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that we're all trying to create in our mind

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of the interconnection of things: the environmental footprints

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1,000 miles away of the things that we buy;

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the social consequences 10,000 miles away

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of the daily decisions that we make as consumers.

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As we try to build this view,

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and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture,

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the information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers:

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numbers in the millions, in the hundreds of millions,

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in the billions and now in the trillions.

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Bush's new budget is in the trillions, and these are numbers

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that our brain just doesn't have the ability to comprehend.

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We can't make meaning out of these enormous statistics.

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And so that's what I'm trying to do with my work,

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is to take these numbers, these statistics

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from the raw language of data, and to translate them

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into a more universal visual language, that can be felt.

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Because my belief is, if we can feel these issues,

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if we can feel these things more deeply,

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then they'll matter to us more than they do now.

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And if we can find that,

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then we'll be able to find, within each one of us,

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what it is that we need to find to face the big question,

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which is: how do we change?

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That, to me, is the big question that we face as a people right now:

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how do we change? How do we change as a culture,

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and how do we each individually take responsibility

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for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of,

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and that is our own behavior?

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My belief is that you don't have to make yourself bad

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to look at these issues.

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I'm not pointing the finger at America in a blaming way.

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I'm simply saying, this is who we are right now.

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And if there are things that we see

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that we don't like about our culture,

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then we have a choice.

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The degree of integrity that each of us can bring to the surface,

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to bring to this question, the depth of character that we can summon,

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as we show up for the question of how do we change --

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it's already defining us as individuals and as a nation,

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and it will continue to do that, on into the future.

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And it will profoundly affect the well-being, the quality of life

0:10:23.000,0:10:24.000
of the billions of people

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who are going to inherit the results of our decisions.

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I'm not speaking abstractly about this,

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I'm speaking -- this is who we are in this room,

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right now, in this moment.

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Thank you and good afternoon.

0:10:51.000,0:10:57.000
(Applause)