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So in the oasis of
intelligentsia that is TED,
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I stand here before you this evening
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as an expert in dragging heavy stuff
around cold places.
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I've been leading polar expeditions for
most of my adult life,
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and last month, my teammate
Tarka L'Herpiniere and I
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finished the most ambitious expedition
I've ever attempted.
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In fact, it feels like I've been
transported straight here
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from four months in the middle of nowhere,
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mostly grunting and swearing,
straight to the TED stage.
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So you can imagine that's a transition
that hasn't been entirely seamless.
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One of the interesting side effects
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seems to be that my short-term
memory is entirely shot.
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So I've had to write some notes
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to avoid too much grunting and swearing
in the next 17 minutes.
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This is the first talk I've given
about this expedition,
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and while we weren't sequencing genomes
or building space telescopes,
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this is a story about giving everything we
had to achieve something
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that hadn't been done before.
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So I hope in that you might
find some food for thought.
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It was a journey, an
expeditionin Antarctica
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the coldest, windiest, driest and
highest altitude continent on Earth.
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It's a fascinating place.
It's a huge place.
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It's twice the size of Australia,
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a continent that is the same size
as China and India put together.
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As an aside, I have experienced
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an interesting phenomenon
in the last few days,
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something that I expect Chris Hadfield
may get at TED in a few years' time,
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conversations that go something like this:
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"Oh, Antarctica. Awesome.
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My husband and I did Antarctica
with Lindblad for our anniversary."
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Or, "Oh cool, did you go there
for the marathon?"
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(Laughter)
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Our journey was, in fact,
69 marathons back to back
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in 105 days, an 1,800 mile round trip
on foot from the coast of Antarctica
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to the South Pole and back again.
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In the process, we broke the record
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for the longest human-powered polar
journey in history by more than 400 miles.
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(Applause)
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For those of you from the Bay area,
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it was the same as walking from
here to San Francisco,
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then turning around
and walking back again.
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So as camping trips go, it was a long one,
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and one I've seen summarized
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most succinctly here on the hallowed
pages of Business Insider Malaysia.
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[Two Explorers Just Completed
A Polar Expedition That Killed
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Everyone The Last Time It was Attempted]
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Chris Hadfield talked so eloquently
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about fear and about the odds of success
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and indeed the odds of survival.
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Of the nine people in history that had
attempted this journey before us,
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none had made it to the pole and back,
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and five had died in the process.
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This is Captain Robert Falcon Scott.
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He led the last team
to attempt this expedition.
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Scott and his rival Sir Ernest Shackleton,
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over the space of a decade,
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both led expeditions battling to become
the first to reach the South Pole
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to chart and map
the interior of Antarctica,
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a place we knew less about, at the time,
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than the surface of the moon,
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because we could see
the moon through telescopes.
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Antarctica was, for the most part,
a century ago, uncharted.
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Some of you may know the story.
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Scott's last expedition, the
Terra Nova Expedition in 1910,
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started as a giant
siege-style approach.
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He had a big team using ponies,
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using dogs, using petrol-driven tractors,
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dropping pre-positioned
depots of food and fuel
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through which Scott's final team of five
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would travel to the five
would travel to the pole,
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where they would turn around and ski back
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to the coast again on foot.
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Scott and his final team of five
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arrived at the South Pole
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in January 1912
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to find they had been beaten to it
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by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen,
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who rode on dogsled.
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Scott's team ended up on foot,
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and for more than a century
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this journey has remained unfinished.
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Scott's team of five died
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on the return journey,
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and for the last decade,
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I've been asking myself why that is.
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How come this has
remained the high water mark?
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Scott's team covered 1,600 miles on foot.
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No one's come close to that ever since.
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So this is the high water mark
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of human endurance, human endeavor,
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human athletic achievement
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in arguably the harshest climate on Earth.
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It was as if the marathon record
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has remained unbroken since 1912.
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And of course some strange
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and predictable combination of curiosity,
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stubbornness, and probably hubris,
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led me to thinking I might be the man
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to try and finish the job.
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Unlike Scott's expedition,
there were just two of us,
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and we set off from
the coast of Antarctica
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in October last year
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dragging everything ourselves,
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a process Scott called "man-hauling."
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When I say it was like walking
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from here to San Francisco and back,
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I actually mean it was like dragging
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something that ways a shade more
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than the heaviest ever NFL player.
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Our sledges weighed 200 kilos,
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or 440 pounds each at the start,
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the same weights that the weakest
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of Scott's ponies pulled.
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Early on, we averaged 0.5 miles per hour.
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Perhaps the reason no one
had attempted this journey
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until now, for more than a century,
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was that no one had been quite
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stupid enough to try.
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And while I can't claim we were
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exploring in the genuine
Edwardian sense of the word
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— we weren't naming any mountains
or mapping any uncharted valleys —
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I think we were stepping
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into uncharted territory in a human sense.
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Certainly, if in the future we learn
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there is an area of the human brain
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that lights up when one curses oneself,
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I wouldn't be at all surprised.
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You've heard that the average American
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spends 90 percent of their time indoors.
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We didn't go indoors
for nearly four months.
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We didn't see a sunset either.
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It was 24-hour daylight.
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Living conditions were quite spartan.
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I changed my underwear three times
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in 105 days,
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and Tarka and I shared 30 square feet
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on the canvas,
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though we did have some technology
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that Scott could never have imagined,
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and we blogged live
every evening from the tent
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via a laptop
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and a custom-made satellite transmitter,
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all of which were solar-powered:
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we had a flexible
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photovoltaic panel over the tent.
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And the writing was important to me.
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As a kid, I was inspired
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by the literature of adventure
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and exploration, and I think
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we've all seen here this week
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the importance and the power
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of storytelling.
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So we had some 21st-century gear,
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but the reality is that
the challenges that Scott faced
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were the same that way faced:
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those of the weather
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and of what Scott called glide,
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the amount of friction
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between the sledges and the snow.
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The lowest wind chill we experienced
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was in the minus-70s,
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and we had zero visibility,
what's called white-out,
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for much of our journey.
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We traveled up and down one of the largest
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and most dangerous glaciers
in the world, the Beardmore glacier.
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It's 110 miles long: most of its surface
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is what's called blue ice.
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You can see it's a beautiful,
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shimmering, steel-hard blue surface
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covered with thousands and thousands
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of crevasses, these deep cracks
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in the glacial ice, up to 200 feet deep.
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Planes can't land here,
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so we were at the most risk,
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technically when we had
the slimmest chance
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of being rescued.
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We got to the South Pole
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after 61 days on foot,
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with one day off for bad weather,
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and I'm sad to say, it was
something of an anticlimax.
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There's a permanent American base,
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the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station,
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at the South Pole.
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They have an airstrip,
they have a canteen,
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they have hot showers,
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they have a post office, a tourist shop,
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a basketball court
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that doubles as a movie theater.
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So it's a bit different these days,
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and there are also acres of junk.
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I think it's a marvelous thing
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that humans can exist
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365 days of the year
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with hamburgers and hot showers
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and movie theaters,
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but it does seem to produce
a lot of empty cardboard boxes.
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You can see on the left this photograph,
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several square acres of junk
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waiting to be flown out
from the South Pole.
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But there is also a pole at the South Pole
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and we got there on foot, unassisted,
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unsupported, by the hardest route,
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900 miles in record time,
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dragging more weight
than anyone in history.
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And if we'd stopped there and flown home,
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which would have been
the eminently sensible thing to do,
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then my talk would end here
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and it would end something like this.
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If you have the right team around you,
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the right tools, the right technology,
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and if you have enough self-belief
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and enough determination,
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than anything is possible.
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But then we turned around,
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and this is where things get interesting.
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High on the Antarctic plateau,
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over 10,000 feet, it's very windy,
very cold, very dry, we were exhausted.
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We'd covered 35 marathons,
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we were only halfway,
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and we had a safety net, of course,
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of ski planes and satellite phones
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and live, 24-hour tracking beacons
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that didn't exist for Scott,
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but in hindsight,
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rather than making our lives easier,
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the safety net actually allowed us
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to cut things very fine indeed,
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to sail very close to our absolute limits
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as human beings,
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and it is an exquisite form of torture
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to exhaust yourself to the point
of starvation day after day
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while dragging a sledge
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full of food.
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For years, I'd been writing glib lines
in sponsorship proposals
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about pushing the limits
of human endurance,
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but in reality, that was
a very frightening place
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to be indeed.
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We had, before we'd got to the Pole,
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two weeks of almost permanent
headwind, which slowed us down.
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As a result, we'd had several days
of eating half rations.
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We had a finite amount of food
in the sledges to make this journey,
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so we were trying to string that out
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by reducing our intake to half
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the calories we should be eating.
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As a result, we both became
increasingly hypoglycemic:
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we had low blood
sugar levels day after day
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and increasingly susceptible
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to the extreme cold.
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Tarka took this photo of me one evening
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after I'd nearly passed out
with hypothermia.
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We both had repeated bouts of hypothermia,
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something I hadn't experienced before,
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and it was very humbling indeed.
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As much as you might
like to think, as I do,
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that you're the kind
of person who doesn't quit,
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that you'll go down swinging,
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hypothermia doesn't leave you much choice.
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You become utterly incapacitated.
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It's like being a drunk toddler.
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You become pathetic.
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I remember just wanting
to lie down and quit.
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It was a peculiar, peculiar feeling,
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and a real surprise to me
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to be debilitated to that degree.
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And then we ran out of food completely,
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46 miles short of the first of the depots
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that we'd laid on our outward journey.
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We'd laid 10 depots of food,
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literally burying food and fuel,
for our return journey
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— the food was for a cooker so you
could melt snow to get water —
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and I was forced to make the decision
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to call for a resupply flight,
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a ski plane carrying eight days of food
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to tide us over that gap.
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They took 12 hours to reach us
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from the other side of Antarctica.
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Calling for that plane
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was one of the toughest
decisions of my life,
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and I sound like a bit of a fraud
standing here now with a sort of belly.
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I've put on 30 pounds
in the last three weeks.
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Being that hungry has left
an interesting mental scar,
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which is that I've been hoovering up
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every hotel buffet that I can find.
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But we were genuinely quite hungry,
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and in quite a bad way.
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I don't regret calling
for that plane for a second,
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because I'm still standing here
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alive with all digits
intact telling this story,
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but getting external assistance like that
was never part of the plan,
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and it's something my ego
is still struggling with.
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This was the biggest dream I've ever had,
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and it was so nearly perfect.
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On the way back down to the coast,
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our crampons — they're the spikes
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on our boots that we have for traveling
over this blue ice on the glacier —
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broke on the top of the Beardmore.
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We still had 100 miles to go downhill
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on very slippery rock-hard blue ice.
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They needed repairing almost every hour.
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To give you an idea of scale,
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this is looking down towards the mouth
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of the Beardmore Glacier.
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You could fit the entirety of Manhattan
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in the gap on the horizon.
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That's 20 miles between
Mt. Hope and Mt. Kiffin.
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I've never felt as small
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as I did in Antarctica.
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When we got down
to the mouth of the glacier,
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we found fresh snow had obscured
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the dozens of deep crevasses.
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One of Shackleton's men described
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crossing this sort of terrain as like
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walking over the glass roof
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of a railway station.
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We fell through more times
than I can remember,
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usually just putting a ski
or a boot through the snow.
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Occasionally we went in
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all the way up to our armpits,
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but thankfully never deeper than that.
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And less than five weeks ago,
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after 105 days, we crossed
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this oddly inauspicious finish line,
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the coast of Ross Island on the
New Zealand coast of Antarctica.
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You can see the ice in the foreground
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and the sort of rubbly rock behind that.
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Behind us lay an unbroken ski trail
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of nearly 1,800 miles.
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We made the longest ever
polar journey on foot,
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something I've been dreaming of doing
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for a decade.
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And looking back,
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I still stand by all the things
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I've been saying for years
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about the importance of goals
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and determination and self-belief,
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but I'll also believe that I haven't given
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much thought to what happens
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when you reach the all-consuming goal
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that you've dedicated most
of your adult life too,
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and the reality is that I'm still figuring
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that bit out.
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As I said, there are very few
superficial signs that I've been away.
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I've put on 30 pounds.
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I've got some very faint
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— they're probably covered
in makeup now — frostbite scars.
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I've got one on my nose,
one on each cheek,
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from where the goggles are,
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but inside I am a very
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different person indeed.
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If I'm honest,
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Antarctica challenged me
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and humbled me so deeply
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that I'm not sure I'll ever be able
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to put it into words.
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I'm still struggling to piece
together my thoughts.
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That I'm standing here telling this story
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is proof that we all
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can accomplish great things,
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through ambition, through passion,
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through sheer stubbornness,
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by refusing to quit,
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that if you dream something hard enough,
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as Sting said,
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it does indeed come to pass.
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But I'm also standing here saying,
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you know what, that cliche
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about the journey being more important
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than the destination?
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There's something in that.
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The closer I got to my finish line,
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that rubbly, rocky coast of Ross Island,
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the more I started to realize
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that the biggest lesson
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that this very long, very hard walk
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might be teaching me
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is that happiness
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is not a finish line,
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that for us humans,
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the perfection that so many of us
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seem to dream of
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might not ever be truly attainable,
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and that if we can't feel content
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here, today, now, on our journeys
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amidst the mess and the striving
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that we all inhabit, the open loops,
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the half-finished to-do lists,
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the could-do-better-next-times,
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then we might never feel it.
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A lot of people have asked me, what next?
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Right now, I am very happy just recovering
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and in front of hotel buffets,
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but as Bob Hope put it,
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I feel very humble,
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but I think I have the strength
of character to fight it.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
Eren Gokce
13:00 - 13:03: I think it should be Mount Kyffin instead of Mount Kiffin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Kyffin
Thanks for any feedback,
Regards.