Original subtitles

(RUNNING WATER)

DEAN KAMEN: Here's something that should hurt your brain.

We can empty half of all the beds

in all the hospitals in the world

by just giving people clean water.

So have you ever heard of Dean Kamen?

No.

No? No.

Uh, I don't think so.

I have not heard of Dean Kamen.

I've heard of the Cayman Islands,

but not Dean Kamen. Okay.

Do you know what a Segway is? Of course.

Yes, I know what those are. Little trolleys?

The little things you ride with two wheels? Yeah. Mmm-hmm.

So Dean Kamen's the guy that invented the Segway.

Oh, really? Yeah.

Oh, wait. Is that the dude that, like, drove a Segway off the cliff?

He's... He's dead, isn't he?

Didn't he fall off one and die?

A lot of people think the inventor of the Segway is dead.

But they don't really know who invented the Segway.

KAMEN: This rumor has been out that

the Segway guy has died.

One of the people that hears this story is my mother.

So she, of course, calls my cell phone and gets no answer.

There are so many messages.

I call my mother and say, "Mother, what's wrong?"

"Now that I'm talking to you, nothing!"

Oh, did that really work?

So what is that thing actually for?

All you're really trying to do is

see something and hear something

that you knew to be contemporaneous.

I was just trying to make some noise to confuse...

(MEN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY)

Oh, but that should have information about where in the system it is.

MAN: It also has the take and it has the numbers...

Okay, come back, come back!

KAMEN: I must admit, I do like technology.

I like machines and I like the efficiency they deliver.

I'm guilty.

From a very early age, I both wanted to know

more and more about the rules by which this universe of ours operates.

And, through the world of engineering,

I wanted to start applying those rules

to create inventions that would give people a better quality of life,

if those inventions work.

Most kids, when they grow up, develop what's called good judgment.

That's what we as adults call it.

When we actually lose our sense of fun, our imagination,

and a whole lot of things that I didn't want to give up.

When I was a kid, I thought,

"I'm gonna have a house, where I can get up in the morning

"and go downstairs

"and open up a giant glass wall

"and take a helicopter out of my house

"and take off right from my house

"and go anyplace I want to go."

When I was a kid, I thought it would be cool to have secret passages.

"I'm gonna put secret passages in."

Some people want a classic piece of artwork in their foyer.

A Monet. A Rembrandt.

In my foyer, I have this old steam engine

built well over 150 years ago.

It actually ran a tugboat called the HMS Oscar.

I would be terrified to have to get on a horse.

Some great big animal with teeth.

I don't wanna go near a pile of muscle that big.

But I've never been afraid of any machine.

That engine, it's a work of art,

created by a different kind of artist.

It also represents great achievements

that took hundreds of years to develop and understand.

When I'm awake, I'm working.

So I'm wearing my work clothes.

EVELYN KAMEN: Dean just doesn't know the difference

between work and play.

So he always wears his jeans.

None of the kids like him.

I have all the letters, and this one I got from Dean. 1964.

"Dear Mommy and Daddy. I want to come home."

Exclamation.

"If I can't come home,

"please send the following as soon as possible.

"One accountant.

"One marketing expert.

"Three secretaries.

"I'll try to write again soon, but I have to go to volleyball now.

"Your willful and outcast son, me."

That was written then. (LAUGHING)

He wanted three secretaries.

KAMEN: I remember very well being a little kid.

I'd think and I'd look at the world and I'd imagine things.

Everything I saw gave me questions about everything.

Why, when you bounce a ball, each time it hits the ground,

it bounces lower on the next shot.

How does it do that?

You put a hot cup on the table,

it cools off.

You put a cold cup on the table, it warms up.

How?

Why?

Most of what the world does is quite amazing.

And you could be very confident

that it'll always do the same thing over and over again.

But how does all that happen?

There are a few people that actually

took little pieces of that and made sense out of it.

I asked my father for these great scientists and thinkers.

They're beautiful art.

And they're done by my father.

You start with Archimedes.

Over 2,000 years later, we still refer to Archimedes' principle.

Staggeringly,

after Archimedes, we had a few things, which included the Dark Ages.

We come out of them with a guy like Leonardo da Vinci.

He was an artist and an engineer,

a scientist.

I mean, this guy was unbelievable.

And then you only have to wait a few hundred years

to Galileo Galilei.

Really, the first modern scientist.

He gave us the scientific method.

He dies in 1642,

and we don't have to wait very long, because in the same year,

Isaac Newton is born.

And Isaac Newton developed Newtonian mechanics.

How masses move and interact with each other.

Then, 1860s, comes James Clerk Maxwell

and gives us what are now known as Maxwell's equations.

Four statements that link all of electricity, magnetism,

light,

into a comprehensive, well-understood system.

And by 1905, along comes Big Al.

He sort of put us where we are today.

And I'm waiting for the next big thing to happen.

Between this guy in 200 BC,

through this guy, who was alive when I was born,

you've got 2,200 years.

And other than these six guys,

not much happened.

It's pretty humbling. But it's, uh...

It's pretty exciting

to wonder about

what will be the contribution

of the next guy that deserves a place on this wall?

Or woman.

Are you ready?

My middle brother has most of the fame in the family

and he's known for Segway.

But the reality is he helped me solve a problem we both used to say,

"You don't wake up in the morning and say, 'I got to invent something.'

"You wake up in the morning and you say,

"'There's a problem to be solved.'"

I had just put a machine shop in my parents' basement.

And I started building electronics and selling it.

And then my brother would come home from med school.

He was already working on his basic research, treating babies with leukemia.

That was his specialty.

But to deliver his new drugs and new therapies,

you couldn't use all the standard medical equipment,

because even at their lowest rates,

they were 10 times too high a rate for a baby.

I said, "Bart, why don't you leave the drug

"in the syringe that it came in in the first place?"

"And then we'll build you a little device

"with a precision loader that delivers it

"directly out of the syringe into the baby."

So he said, "That would be great."

But by giving him those little drug delivery systems

that were seen by all the rest of the faculty

when he was still a student in med school,

all these other physicians and researchers

saw these little things, and said, "Wait a minute.

"Since it's small and battery operated,

"I can slip it in the pocket of some adult

"and they can leave the hospital getting their drugs

"with a portable system."

Which didn't exist in those days.

And then I start to ask these docs, like,

"What do you plan to deliver?"

"How about insulin?"

We moved out of the basement, we started making

lots of different pharmaceutical delivery systems.

Ended up building a nice company around that.

I like to work on interesting problems,

technical problems,

that if they are solved, also,

can be used by a whole lot of people to make their lives better.

Which is why we spent pretty much our whole career

at DEKA

building medical equipment.

The wiring has to go right through the middle of it...

Right, so there's no rotation of those components?

KAMEN: I'm an inventor.

What do inventors do?

Inventors look at problems,

the same problems everybody else looks at, but see them differently.

We were working on a way to make home dialysis a possibility.

Probably 20 years ago, we said, "We can take dialysis.

"Let people do it at home. Alone.

"Life support in your own bedroom."

And most of the people at Baxter said, "You're nuts."

In fact, throughout my life, I only start on projects, typically,

if enough credible people tell me, "You're nuts."

(LAUGHTER)

'Cause then you know, "This must be a big problem."

Baxter had introduced the idea of peritoneal dialysis.

The bad news is while the therapy worked,

the machine, that could, quote,

"Safely push this fluid through a patient"

turned out to be this.

They loaded a bag up here

and you ran the tube out of the bag,

not up to there, because the fluid can't travel by itself...

They couldn't pump it, because if something went wrong, you could...

Then you pulled the tube out and then you opened up this little device...

Down to the floor... Made a weight scale out of this

and they weigh the fluid as it's coming out...

If the patient rolled over and tugged on the tube,

took the bags that were hanging here...

The patient had to run all that stuff every day, or the nurse.

So we looked at this, and said, "Baxter, it's a great therapy.

"You guys did something unbelievable.

"But the implementation of the solution

"is just too kludgy to fix.

"We got a better idea."

We said, "The problem isn't

"your machine is noisy, your machine is heavy, or your machine is...

"The problem is this patient doesn't have a functioning kidney."

We decided we could build a simple machine that would allow patients

to dialyze themselves at home without having to live in a hospital

or a dialysis center

every other day for the rest of their lives.

It was a completely different approach to a problem.

That machine needed about five gallons

of pure, medical grade water to operate.

If we could find a way to make the purest water in the world

out of the tap water in your home,

and turn it into medical grade water,

we could eliminate the next problem they were having.

Shipping all this water all over the country.

We stared working on a machine to turn tap water into water for injection.

It turned out that unless you know everything about the water,

in the northeast, it has iron,

in other places, it has other problems.

We decided that

a simple filter, or a membrane,

or osmosis, or activated charcoal

is unlikely to meet the need.

We decided we better go back to the gold standard that the medical community

has used to make medical grade water for 100 years.

That is, distill it.

The problem is the energy required to distill water

requires that you take water in its liquid phase at room temperature

and not only get it hot enough to boil, to get frothy,

we need to get it all to turn into steam.

Nature does it, because you got the sun.

The biggest nuclear plant we've ever seen

sitting out there that could boil all this water out of the ocean.

That's an enormous amount of energy.

We don't have a lot of energy.

The magic of a vapor compression distiller,

particularly the little one that we've made,

is that the water comes in,

it gets boiled, it gets condensed,

and it comes out of the machine

just a tad warmer than it went in,

'cause we took all the energy back out of it.

And by recycling all of that energy,

we reduced the requirements of this machine

from 25,000 watts, which is about 20 houses worth of power,

to less power than a hand-held hair dryer.

So now you take our machine

and you plug it into any normal outlet in a typical home

and it uses a little bit of power.

But it just keeps recycling that energy over and over and over again,

so that it's no big deal.

KAMEN: I am a very slow learner.

I'm very flattered that you think I'm a real genius.

But if I'm a genius, all I can tell you is I am the slowest,

dumbest genius you'll ever meet.

You just gotta read it

and read it again,

and read it again.

Think about it, and think about it again,

and then, all of a sudden, it all starts to make sense.

EVELYN: While in third grade,

when Mrs. Pfeffer said,

"Evelyn, I can't understand, he is so bright.

"But he's not producing as he should."

KAMEN: I was having, as a little kid,

a lot of trouble learning to read.

If I would see letters out of context,

or words that could be "pots" and "stop"

and "saw" and "was,"

I couldn't tell them apart.

My older brother could read enormously fast.

And I always figured it was practice

or it was something that I was doing wrong.

We were very concerned.

I don't know that we broadcast it.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know, but we weren't ashamed.

We took him for testing to the local psychologist.

He was a non-reader.

KAMEN: I wish I could find a way to not be dyslexic.

But if somebody said, "But here's the cost."

If it took away something else that I'm good at,

at this point in my life, I'd probably say, "No, I'll stay with what I got."

Compared to other problems, this one's not so bad.

And maybe it was a catalyst to help me do other things particularly well.

Once we realized we could take everything out of water, no matter what it is,

organics, toxins, metals,

we had a process to turn anything into pure water.

Why is it only for the special subset of people

that have a dialysis machine in their own bedroom?

The scalability of this solution

is what is attractive about it.

The fact that it could be used all over the world

in all environments

with all kinds of bad water.

That was sort of an epiphany.

We recognized that a huge

potential opportunity existed

for solving the world's water problems

with a vapor compression distiller.

That same machine could be carried into villages

and allow a few hundred million people,

or a few billion people,

to have the purest water in the world.

I hadn't realized how big the problem was.

NEWSCASTER 1: Analysis suggests the world will face

a 40% shortfall of clean water by 2030.

NEWSCASTER 2: We live on a planet 70% covered by water,

and we're fighting over a half of a percent.

NEWSCASTER 3: As things change, water conflict will escalate.

NEWSCASTER 4: Competition for water

between Israel, Jordan and Syria

has turned the once-mighty Jordan River

into a trickle.

NEWSCASTER 5: There's no way it's not gonna effect everybody.

NEWSCASTER 6: In Central America, the lack of drinking water,

together with pollution,

are having a huge impact on children's health.

NEWSCASTER 7: Child mortality figures are horrific in Afghanistan.

One child out of five dies under the age of five

through drinking polluted water.

NEWSCASTER 8: Almost 50 children are reporting in every day

with symptoms of diarrhea and vomiting.

Here, four children are forced to share one bed.

NEWSCASTER 9: A million people

might die in Bangladesh alone this year from contaminated water.

KAMEN: In the underdeveloped world,

the average amount of time per day spent by women

looking for water that's safe for their kids is four hours.

And if it didn't turn out to be the right stuff,

they spend the next day or two burying their babies.

That shouldn't be their choices.

They shouldn't have to go that far.

They shouldn't have to make the choice between

drinking the kind of stuff you wouldn't give to your dog,

or not having anything at all.

Everybody else that's working on the global water problem

is thinking of massive, interconnected infrastructure.

They don't understand that the 21st-century problem needs a 21st-century solution.

There's a lot to be said for, "Let's minimize risk.

"Let's know what we're doing."

But sometimes, when the need is really big,

and the currently available solutions are woefully inadequate,

it is appropriate to put a stake in the ground

and say, "We're not doing it the way we did it before.

"We gotta find a totally new approach.

"It's time to change."

MAN: Why do you take on these impossible tasks?

(LAUGHING)

It's always, like, the hardest thing.

What is... What compels you?

Well, first of all, believe it or not,

I don't get up in the morning and look in the mirror and say,

"Go after some impossible problem.

"And make sure to frustrate yourself

"beyond reasonable. Again. Today.

"You've been doing it on water for 15 years,

"just keep doing that."

I do not go look, every morning,

for the most difficult problem on which I can continue to frustrate myself

and all of my people and fail.

That's not the goal.

It's a consequence, but not a goal.

Ginger piques nationwide interest.

Will it just solve world hunger?

KAMEN: I went to my office and there were boom trucks with cameras.

"What's going on?"

And people were saying, "Well, this is the headquarters

"of the place with the great secret project

"that's gonna change the world."

I didn't know about the leak,

but it certainly wasn't, as many people suspected,

a marketing scheme.

People were speculating, it could beam you places,

it was a transporter, like in Star Trek.

And I was worried from that day forward that no matter what we did,

it would have the potential of having people say, "Really? That's all?

"You turned lead into gold, I was hoping for platinum."

After months of hype,

the wraps are coming off that top-secret invention codenamed "IT."

I wanna know what "IT" is.

What is "IT"? What does "IT" do?

And when will "IT" be somewhere where I can buy one?

NEWSCASTER 1: We're about to unveil the invention

that's been the subject of hundreds of media reports

in the topic of a global guessing game.

NEWSCASTER 2: Some say it will change the world,

some say that it's gonna be as broad as the Internet.

(CHEERING)

DIANE SAWYER: I'm tempted to say, "That's it?"

(LAUGHING)

But that can't be it.

(LAUGHTER)

Hey, you know what would be really cool?

If it had four wheels and a compartment where people could sit inside.

(LAUGHTER)

(CLAPPING)

Ginger is the evolution of walking.

First, we crawled on all fours.

No, first we climbed out of the ocean.

Then, we were four-legged beasts.

And then we learned to walk erect.

And now,

We ginger.

People that live in cities, people that only wanna move around a small community

shouldn't be using a 4,000-pound machine

to move their 150-pound ass around town.

MAN 1: What are these? (MAN 2 SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY)

MAN 1: Oh, good.

KAMEN: I like to work on projects where there's a discontinuity.

Where you can't use linear thinking

to get from A to B to C to where we are.

You have to take a big intellectual leap.

(GASPS)

Greetings, foot people.

(LAUGHTER)

How are things back in the 20th century?

Gentlemen, forward!

(LAUGHING)

WOMAN: The traditional Segway, as far as I know,

made a huge splash when it came out in 2002.

But is it true that it's only sold about 50,000?

What went wrong there?

MAN: Well, I think the problem for the Segway was really the price.

At about $5,000, it's a pretty expensive toy.

KAMEN: In retrospect, there's probably lots of ways

to go back and play the coulda-woulda-shoulda-mighta.

Could it have been cheaper?

Could we have addressed the market differently?

But we didn't do either of those.

And what difference would that have made, we'll never know.

MAN: Very smooth!

KAMEN: I don't think my perspective of the Segway has changed very much.

It really is that connection,

that segway between walking and cars.

I don't know what people will be doing in 10 or 20 years

when there's nine or ten billion people on this planet,

most of them living in cities.

But I know one way they won't be doing it.

They won't be sitting in 3,000-pound machines called cars,

creeping along, sucking up each other's exhaust.

That's insane.

Are there three items you can't live without?

You mean that exist today, or that I hope will exist soon?

Either one.

Well, you know, the one that, sadly,

I don't think will come about in my lifetime,

the one I've always wanted is a time machine.

The only thing that ever really scares me

is the fact that life is short

and you can't do everything.

I work as much as I can, as hard as I can, but you can't do everything.

KAMEN: The only thing we have that we can't make any more of

is time.

There's an eternity behind me,

and I will never get to experience that.

I won't see the big bang, I won't know how it happened.

I won't even be able to see

things of a mere 100 or 200 or 300 years ago.

I will not be able to see

Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address.

There's a long timeline, then I was born.

And then in a relatively short time,

a dot along that line, I'm gone.

And there'll be a very long future out there.

I won't be part of that, either.

So in that very short segment of this nearly infinite line,

where I have the capacity to see the world and understand and do things,

I don't intend to waste any of it.

Why is everybody saying that there's a looming water shortage?

Okay? Why?

Well, how about 50%

of all human disease on this planet today

is a result of water-borne pathogens.

So people drink the water, the disease is in it,

and then they get sick? 50%.

How about... Stop drinking water. That's my point.

(LAUGHING)

Most organizations, when they want to clean water,

first say, "What's wrong with the water?"

And if it's ocean water, they say, "Let's use osmosis membranes."

If it's water that's got heavy metals in it,

they put charcoal filters in front of it.

If it's water that's got bioburden in it,

they say, "Let's use antibiotics or chlorine

"or something to kill the bioburden."

But you had to know which of those processes to use

for any particular problem with the water,

and you had to have access to that particular solution.

"No, no, no. We'll just use chlorine tablets."

Well, that's great.

As long as you can run down to the local 7-Eleven

to buy the tablets, pretest the water.

Oh, wait a minute, you can't.

They don't even have roads.

You can't imagine that in these little villages,

they have, oh,

an epidemiologist, a microbiologist,

an organic chemist, somebody to...

So I decided, you gotta take a different approach to the problem.

We've seen in the last generation,

we went from Ma Bell,

big, centralized systems to cellphones.

We went from big, mainframe computers to personal computing.

Why can't we go in the same way

in the developing world to point of use generation

of pure, clean water out of anything,

instantly where you need it?

You have to build a box, maybe the size of this,

that is a simple to operate water utility.

KAMEN: This is an early version of my black box.

We made it black, we want it rugged to sit outside.

If you touch it, it feels like the bed liner of a Chevy truck.

People ask me what it's made out of.

It's actually made out of the bed liner of a Chevy truck.

(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

Because I wanted it rugged and I figured those guys know how to do that.

You've got an incredible invention here.

Um, tell me what this does. (KAMEN CLEARS THROAT)

That box is a vapor compression distiller

with no filters, no membranes, no chemicals.

You can stick one hose that comes out of it, which I'll show you,

into any source of water... So this thing right here?

This is the dirty water? Over here? That's dirty water.

KAMEN: You stick a hose into anything that looks wet,

KAMEN: anywhere in the world... STEPHEN COLBERT: A puddle?

KAMEN: A puddle, the ocean. COLBERT: The ocean.

A chemical waste site.

A latrine. 50 gallon drum of urine.

A 50 gallon drum of urine. Okay.

And it comes through this machine and it comes out here

as perfect, distilled water.

KAMEN: We said, "What if we make a system

"that might have a sophisticated technology inside,

"but the use of it is simpler than all the others?"

So no substance put in there, except the water,

will actually end up in the water over there?

That's correct. I'm gonna put that to the test right now.

WOMAN: Whoo!

(AUDIENCE CHEERING)

Let me help you. All right.

I guarantee you,

(AUDIENCE LAUGHING)

that water's gonna be

sweet, spicy and chili flavored.

(AUDIENCE LAUGHING AND CLAPPING)

MAN: Thank you, sir.

(MAN LAUGHS)

Dean's now the official clapper.

MAN: You are, you are... I'm gonna put a credit.

I need a credit for that. (MAN LAUGHS)

KAMEN: Truth is transient.

And there's no place where the truth is more transient

than in technology.

What was true when you were a kid about technology

is probably not true anymore.

The idea that somebody in a little village

in Ghana, or in Bangladesh,

that has no electricity today,

or has no tap water today, the idea that

tomorrow morning

somebody there is gonna wake up, "Oh, look,

"transmission line, switch gear,

"high voltage, low voltage, transformers."

The idea that that's suddenly gonna appear out of nowhere

is ridiculous.

KAMEN: If you want a good example

of where technology helped transform the developing world,

think of the difference between

big, centralized phone systems

and cell phones.

There are 400 million cell phones in Africa.

There are a billion cell phones in India.

Global organizations,

they work on top-down government-to-government big programs,

and we're working on bottom-up

point of use generation of water.

I was told a very long time ago, when I started my business,

that I'd never get anywhere without partners and without a tie.

So I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone.

I had a tie made out of denim

and I gave it to my partner.

So I've had this guy in my office now for 30 years.

We've never had an argument.

Uh, he's always supportive.

He's my partner, my silent partner,

and, uh, he's good to have in the office.

BILL CLINTON: ...saw, my friend, Dean Kamen,

whom I have known for more than 20 years.

I saw the Segway before most people knew what it was.

And a few years ago, we were out in Colorado together, and he said,

"I've got this water purification deal

"and it can revolutionize the world.

"And here's how it works."

He never made me ride the Segway.

He never made me get up in that

wheelchair that climbs up the stairs.

I never had to take any risks to brag on Dean Kamen.

He pours this awful fetid water into this machine

and it drips down, and he says,

"Now drink it."

(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

And so... (LAUGHS)

I did. (AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

And I'm still here, it works. (AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

KAMEN: So this is a machine we built in 2006.

We'll lift the insulating case off and show you what's inside.

The very first units we built,

which required a few years,

times a few dozen engineers,

cost literally millions of dollars apiece.

This is made out of, as you know, expensium.

Where's the unobtainium? Most of what's in here is

made out of unobtainium.

We do have all the unreliabilium in here.

Um... And, uh,

the icantmaketwoathem is in here.

Um...

(LAUGHING)

KAMEN: My father had one mood.

He was happy.

(LAUGHING)

He loved what he did.

And he wanted to sit and do art.

You got me in there? MAN: Oh, you're in.

One of the tales Dean would tell,

somebody asked him about his father's work

and he says, "You know, I don't think my father ever slept."

He said, "I'd wake up in the morning

"and my dad was at the drawing board.

"And I'd go to sleep at night, and my dad was sitting at the drawing board."

I work about eight to 10 hours a day.

MAN: Still? Yeah.

KAMEN: My father was not one of those

Leave It to Beaver fathers.

After dinner, all the other kids

and the fathers would go out and play ball on the streets.

My father would finish dinner

and go upstairs to where he had his second studio

and he would be working.

And I would sit there watching him.

And I basically said to him,

"Dad, you know, I feel badly for you,

"'cause all the other fathers come home from work

"and they get to play with their kids.

"But you have to go back to work."

He put down his brush

and he said, "Dean, don't ever feel sorry for me.

"I love what I do. I'm an artist.

"I get to do something I love all the time.

"You need to find something that you love to do.

"And then you'll be the lucky guy."

I'm the luckiest guy in the world.

I get up every day knowing that there's important things

that I really wanna accomplish.

I tell every kid I meet, "Figure out something you really love to do,

"get so good at it

"that you can make a living doing it.

"If you don't do that,

"you're cheating yourself out of a happy, meaningful life."

Now, jump.

What do you think? GIRL: Good.

WOMAN OVER PA: May I have your attention, please.

KAMEN: After we had refurbished them,

I took the first floor of one of my old mills

and built it into a hands-on science center

that I donated to the community.

One morning, I walked into the little science center

and I noticed that almost every kid in the place

was wearing a sweatshirt or a jersey

that was about the Patriots, or the Bruins.

And I happened to stop and say to one of them wearing one of these jerseys,

"Can you tell me the name of a famous living engineer?"

No, I can't.

You know, we gotta fix that.

KAMEN: And I just went around to every kid and say, "Could you tell me

"the name of some role model, scientist, engineer, inventor?"

And not a single one could.

One of the adults finally said to me,

"Einstein, but I think he's dead."

There's nothing wrong with having great superheroes

from the world of sports, and entertainment, and the arts,

but you'd think there'd be room for

a few people that contribute to society by curing disease,

or creating cell phone technology, or...

You just look at what we take for granted

and nobody has any idea how it got here.

But somehow we think it's remarkable

that this guy can get the ball in the hoop

at a slightly higher percentage than somebody else.

It's just amazing.

Anyway, I walked out of there

and decided I'm gonna build an organization,

the purpose of which is

to change the culture of the United States.

ANNOUNCER: People, get ready, the robots are coming.

(AUDIENCE CHEERING)

KAMEN: FIRST is an organization whose sole goal

is to convince a generation of kids

that science and technology and engineering

actually is fun

and accessible, and rewarding, and important.

They already feel that way about sports.

So we said,

"Let's package science, technology, engineering and math

"into a sporting competition." (AUDIENCE CHEERING)

The kids working with world-class scientists and engineers

build a robot

that's gonna compete with, literally at this point, thousands of other robots.

FIRST was set up on the premise

that we don't have an education problem in this country,

we have a culture problem.

The only difference between this sport and all the others

is every kid on our teams can turn pro.

There's a job out there for every one of these kids.

(AUDIENCE CHEERING)

Thank you.

Lots of people ask me

why I put so much of my own energy into FIRST.

Oh, you're the sophomore? We got you for three years. Okay.

Go to a FIRST event,

walk through the pits, talk to the kids.

I am very confident that in those stands is some kid

that's gonna win a Nobel Prize for curing a major disease,

or creating a new technology.

FIRST is another one of my almost overnight successes.

It's only been 21 years.

And it's gonna be an overnight success, I'm sure, this coming season.

I'm still waiting to where I can say

FIRST is where it should be, which is

in every school in the country.

I've been accused of being

too aggressive about the need for FIRST.

So I've decided to be the new gentler Dean.

I no longer say, "We need FIRST in every school in the country."

We only need FIRST in the schools where you care about the kids.

He'd be a good father. He'd be a tremendous father.

But, uh...

EVELYN: As a matter of fact, several years ago, I said,

"I promise, I'll take care of the baby

"until the baby is housebroken." (LAUGHING)

KAMEN: Of the many decisions I've made in my life,

one that I am totally confident was the right one

was not to have children.

Am I willing to devote

virtually my whole life

to my children?

Could I do that without being resentful?

I doubt it.

EVELYN: The funny thing is, every child that comes into the building

always runs to Uncle Dean.

He picks them up, plays with them.

Every one of them.

KAMEN: Every decision you make

is a set of compromises.

The only thing we have a finite amount of is our time.

I'm not a Superman,

and I couldn't

be as good a parent as my parents were to me

and still do all the other things that I feel compelled to do.

So I will live with the fact that I had great parents

and I tried to do things for the world and other kids

that in some ways are a testament to what my parents did for me.

But I don't need to go down that road.

Inventions really are, I think, a lot like children.

You make them, and generally,

you're surprised by what you did, (AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

but after 17 or 20 years,

they both sort of go off to the world, and never look back.

(AUDIENCE CHEERING)

KAMEN: As currently envisioned, the SlingShot

will produce 1,000 liters of pure water every day

from any kind of impure water.

A thousand liters of water a day

is enough for a hundred people to all have plenty of water to drink,

to cook, and for hygiene.

And the goal is that machine will continue to do that

without much maintenance or overhaul for at least three years,

by which time it will have produced a million liters

of clean water per machine.

We worked on the machine with the mental model of sooner or later

it'll reach the time when we have to try it somewhere

outside of our own lab.

And, uh, you know,

I would've liked a little more time, but as they say,

"The safest place for a ship is in the harbor.

"It just doesn't do you any good there."

We needed to send this thing out

and we needed to get real feedback.

So I decide we gotta test these machines.

So I took some of my engineers.

They're not exactly international travelers, but what the hell?

And we supported the trial just to see whether the technology

would be accepted into those environments and perform as we expected.

(CHEERING)

(SCREAMING)

At the time we sent machines to Honduras,

I was sort of, but maybe not completely, ready to let them go.

I knew that that machine was delicate, fragile,

very, very handmade.

This is crazy.

But Hector says,

"No problema." (LAUGHS)

WOMAN: Lord help us.

KAMEN: But I also knew,

sooner or later, you've gotta run the risk

of letting people really use something.

And we had reached that point.

MAN: Okay, here it is.

June 3rd, at about 1:30 in the afternoon,

we're starting to fill the product bag.

Water's going in.

KAMEN: We just put it in this little town

and said any kid on the way to school

can come and get a 20 liter jug of water.

The first week, it was all boys,

'cause as we all know, there's no reason for girls to go to school.

But after about a week,

we noticed something really surprising.

Suddenly, all the families decided the girls ought to go to school, too.

That was a pretty nice, unplanned

side effect or benefit of this program.

We proved our machine does what we said it would do

with the locally available water,

and that the community saw the value of it.

The bad news is we noticed that most people

would transfer it into a bowl or a pot, or something that was not clean,

and they'd have their hands in it.

And we realized they didn't understand that just because we made it clean,

it's not gonna magically stay that way.

Clearly, we needed to give them better ways

to move it and to store it, and we needed to give them education

about what to do and not to do with the water.

And DEKA

is a small R&D company in Manchester, New Hampshire.

We have not only no global reach,

we have no marketing, no sales, no distribution.

The experience in Honduras made it really clear

that just delivering the machine

is not gonna solve the problem.

People accept new ideas very slowly.

In the 1840s and '50s and '60s,

the telegraph had come along.

Click, click, click,

and a telegram could go anywhere.

Alexander Bell realizes, instead of clicking a switch,

it could use the same infrastructure

that Western Union put in place.

But instead of sending a telegraph key signal, you could send voice.

Watson? Come here, I want you.

KAMEN: Alexander Bell was, of course, all excited about this.

He goes to the biggest company out there, as the story goes.

The board of directors of Western Union

basically said, "You've done a beautiful job

"of making this novelty that you've just demonstrated to us,

"but of what use would this be in a serious business?"

It didn't take very long before he became essentially Bell Telephone,

AT&T.

And Western Union scrambled for years

to try to go back and buy those patents,

to catch up, because they had all that infrastructure.

But they never did.

You gotta be an optimist, if you try to do this stuff.

If you asked me 15 years ago how long did I think it would take?

I would've said, "I don't know, a year or two."

And I would've believed that I can make this

and then I'll show it to people,

and then the light bulb will go on in their head

and they'll see the opportunity and success will be imminent.

I think the reason that the SlingShot problem

turned out to be so long

is because it isn't just a technology problem.

How are you gonna get these machines to the people that need them?

And we started to worry.

How are we gonna make that happen?

Why isn't this a success? I made it work,

it technically does the job, it takes less than a kilowatt.

Why doesn't it work?

Well, I decided, "It's the distribution, stupid."

I'm pretty stupid.

We realized that without a partner

that has an efficient, effective means

of delivering these machines

and the associated information and knowledge and education about them,

we'd never be able to turn this thing

from the science fair project that it was

into an innovation that could spread around the world.

What do you want to do with this?

Well, since 1.1 billion people,

20% of the world's population, goes to bed every night sick or thirsty,

because they don't have access to water, clean water,

we thought we'd put these in production,

figure out how to get them placed around the world

and we'd wipe out 50% of human disease.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

I made a machine that I thought would help people with healthcare.

That's my day job.

So I went to my medical company clients. They can help.

They pretty much said, "We can't help you.

"We'd love to support it. We'll help you with money.

"But, Dean, we can't get this stuff to these places, either."

We'll see what we can do.

I went to governments.

Maybe that's what they're for.

When capitalism doesn't work,

aid organizations, NGOs.

Well, they like to deal with big-scale stuff.

They also might help with funding, they told me,

but these big organizations don't have

people that go out to these little villages.

They don't have an efficient distribution channel.

I went to the United Nations, said, "I've got this box.

"Let's figure out how to help get it out there."

Their basic answer was, "Good for you, we're rooting for you.

"But we don't do that. We don't distribute products

"We don't build sustainable micro-economic systems.

"We don't lend people money, we don't make entrepreneurs.

"That's not what we do."

I was somewhat disappointed.

I believe all of these global organizations want us to succeed.

But it's a different way of thinking that we're delivering to them.

Otherwise, they're going to a place that they haven't been before.

And getting people to do that is very hard.

Innovation is a very difficult, frustrating process.

I was probably...

I don't remember, but young.

Probably eight or nine,

when I had just gotten a new bicycle.

I was just riding it around and around the block.

Then this kid jumped out,

grabbed the bike, pushed me off it,

and told me he didn't want to see

this Jew riding around the block.

And I was lying there, and I knew

that if I didn't ride around the block again,

I would just feel like I'd been defeated.

And to this day I remember looking up at this guy

and saying,

"I'm not gonna fight with you now.

"That would be stupid.

"I'm quite sure you could easily beat me up.

"But I'm gonna get on my bicycle

"and I'm gonna ride around this block again,

"and if you stop me, you better be prepared to kill me."

And I just looked him right in the eye,

and he just walked away.

And I got back on the bicycle and I rode around the block

again, and again, and again

until it started getting dark.

And he never, ever

bothered me again.

One of my all-time favorite quotes,

not by an inventor, per se,

but a guy dealing with some really big problems,

Douglas MacArthur,

who said,

"In war, as in every other human endeavor,

"failure can be summed up in two words.

"'Too late.'"

I don't wanna be too late delivering water.

Every year that we wait, another couple of million people die,

most of them kids.

On the one hand, I am the entrepreneur in heat,

who always thinks everything takes too long.

Every project I've ever done, it takes too long.

On the other hand,

that's another few million people dying,

because we started production late.

We gotta get going.

This is a really, really big day.

I've been given the opportunity

to talk to the entire board of directors

of the Coca-Cola Company

about using our vapor compression distiller

to solve the major global health problem,

bad water.

(MAN CHATTERING OVER RADIO)

We're flying to Atlanta,

we're currently at 40,000 feet.

We're flying at about 433 knots,

a little over 500 miles an hour.

MAN: (OVER RADIO) 12-3, 653.

KAMEN: Lots of people have asked me, "Why Coke?"

It's called FIRST.

ANNOUNCER: And a goal!

Final 4, Round 2 has begun!

KAMEN: It grew so big, it had so many teams from around the country

that it outgrew any venue in the state.

We needed a major sports arena,

and we realized we could put it in the home of the 1996 Olympics.

The 70,000 seat Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

And we're setting up down there at this big arena

and you look up and what's the biggest,

most visible building on the skyline?

And it suddenly hits me.

Is there some company in the world

that gets its product everywhere?

Every little village?

Yeah.

The Coca-Cola Company has bottling operations

in 206 countries,

which is more than the number of countries

that are admitted into the United Nations.

It turned out,

fortunately for us,

that they had some of their own problems.

They said to us, "We haven't really updated our fountain system

"in decades."

Do I have a passion to get up in the morning and work on that project?

Hmm, not so much.

But I said to them,

"I'll help you with your machines, you help me with mine."

And, literally, we had a handshake

with their chairman who said to me, "We'll try."

A couple of years and a lot of effort later,

we delivered and they introduced

their freestyle machine.

We went back to Muhtar Kent and said,

"Now let's figure out

"how we can work together on the other box, my water machine."

MAN: (OVER RADIO) ...2-6 clear to land.

The wind's 210...

(TIRES SQUEALING)

KAMEN: If Coca-Cola decided

that it is in their best interest,

it's in the world's best interest

that we quickly deploy, literally, hundreds of thousands of these machines,

they could do it.

INTERVIEWER: What are you gonna say to people about Coke's

earlier troubles with water?

Well, I think we've now come to live in a world of sound bites,

where everybody wants a simple

one-sentence, or in some case, one-word answer.

And in our culture, we have people that think

businesses is the source of all evil

and other people that think the opposite.

All those simplistic answers have the advantage that they're simple.

They all have the disadvantage that they're wrong.

CROWD: No Pepsi, no Cola!

We want drinking water!

No Pepsi, no Cola!

We want drinking water!

NARRATOR: For every liter of soft drink the company makes,

it has to extract three liters of water.

And angry farmers claim that Coke

is literally sucking the water from beneath their feet.

Coca-Cola has been asked to pay $47 million in compensation

for alleged environmental damage

caused at a bottling plant in Southern India.

The plant, one of its largest there,

was forced to close in 2005 after massive nationwide protests against the company.

MAN: No Pepsi, no Cola. ALL: We want drinking water.

KAMEN: Unbridled power by anybody, a government agency,

a corporation, is always potentially dangerous.

But in the end, most companies work hard

to earn the respect and trust of their customers

because it's in their enlightened best interest.

MUHTAR KENT: We all have to conserve water

and therefore, Coca-Cola has been the first business,

in a way, that has declared a goal of water neutrality by 2020.

Nobody treats water with dignity in the world.

Everybody thinks it's free, it's available,

and then we have said that by 2020,

we are going to globally become water neutral.

That means, give back to the world every liter of water

that we use in our beverages and to make our beverages. That you take.

KAMEN: I think it's a waste of energy,

and it's a disservice to ourselves

to look for who we're gonna blame.

And I think, if we can orchestrate

what government does well, what NGOs do well,

what giant corporations do well,

what little inventors do well,

the result of that is we make the world a better place.

By sitting around trying to figure out

which one of those entities is a bad guy,

we do nothing.

Wait a minute, isn't it Sunday now?

So I get double overtime. (MAN SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY)

So that's triple overtime.

Where's Jimmy Hoffa when I need him?

(CROWD CHEERING)

My mother calls, as all mothers do,

"I'm still worried, Dean, you're working too hard, you're running too far.

"You need to just slow down."

"Okay, Mother. I agree with you."

"So should I stop doing FIRST?" "No."

"Okay, I'll stop working on that medical product." "No."

"Okay, I'll just stop working on the water machine

"we hope to supply to families around the world,

"so two million babies will have clean water." "No."

"Okay, Mother, which of the things I am working on do you recommend I stop?

"Which ones?"

And there's never a good answer.

So I keep going.

Some people like to play golf. Let them go play golf.

We agreed with the Coca-Cola Company

that we would go out and build 15 machines

in this pilot production run to be used in trials.

We were gonna be in five different schools in Ghana

and then from there, depending on how those trials go,

we're moving to other places around Africa and Central America.

(SHEEP BLEATING)

(SCHOOL BELL DINGS)

(SCATTERED CHATTER)

Huh? Okay, it depends.

(CHILD SINGING)

(ALL SINGING)

KAMEN: There were so many horror stories we had heard,

of attempts to do something like bring clean water to places,

that had ended in failure, not for technical reasons,

but for social, economic, financial, political reasons.

(SINGING CONTINUES)

I was afraid that, once again,

it's gonna be a science fair project

and not an innovation that spreads through

that community in that part of the world.

Going, going, going, going...

Gone. (CHEERING)

(ALL SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY)

KAMEN: When the first images came back

and we saw a crowd of excited kids

smiling and laughing, and watching these kids just guzzle this water down,

(CHILDREN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY)

everybody realized that our ideas are one step closer to reality.

So, as all of you know, probably, only too well,

I am a big believer that the last thing you ever want to do

is relax,

go take a nap on that bear skin rug,

before you're sure you shot the bear. (CHUCKLES)

This bear ain't dead yet.

But even I think sometimes it's nice to take a little bit of time

to celebrate.

Couple of weeks ago,

we finally got in writing with signatures on it, the deal.

We are partners now with the Coca-Cola Company.

We've gotta deliver no less than 50 working machines

of the next generation,

half the weight and half the size,

deliverable by the end of this year.

You know, if it works, and we supply water,

we will have potentially supplied more healthcare through this project,

than the sum total of all the projects we've done in 30 years.

So, Jim,

don't screw it up.

(ALL LAUGHING)

Cheers!

(APPLAUDING)

To all of you!

(LAUGHING)

Stewart, Stewart... (STEWART SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY)

Have some pizza, will you?

These people are way too smart not to be scared.

(ALL LAUGHING)

Now, eat the pizza. (ALL AGREEING)

And drink the beer.

And then get back to work.

(LAUGHTER)

KAMEN: A long time ago, in a faraway place,

I, literally, designed the circuit boards.

I etched them in the ferric chloride dish in my mother's oven.

These days, I have 400 extraordinary people,

and each has some specialty

that is in a different zip code of capability

in their specialty than I ever was.

Well, let's do that again. (ALL LAUGHING)

You hit me in the nose, you're dead. (CHUCKLES)

Dennis, I got good news and bad news. DENNIS: What's that?

These things are working...

KAMEN: To make one more of the models of the machine you've seen,

I say to the 20 people in there,

"You make the compressor wheel out of that block of aluminum.

"You make this part out of steel."

You add up the cost of all those people and all those resources,

and it turns out, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars

to put another model out there.

(CHILDREN SINGING)

In five out of five locations in Ghana,

we met every expectation we had

for performance and acceptance,

and we sadly confirmed,

yup, the basic machine is too heavy to bring to scale,

it's too expensive to bring to scale,

and it was too hard to set up

and deal with the sometimes erratic access to electricity.

And as a result of that experiment,

we said, "Let's figure out how to make them more cost-effective to manufacture,

"smaller and lighter, and let's do the next round."

So I know we're going with the plastic housing, instead of the aluminum,

but that aluminum rotor,

and all that machining was obviously...

Costly. Right.

How are we doing that? So we're gonna go to an injection-molded rotor,

just like we did with the housings.

Right, so there's your rotor.

KAMEN: So...

Plastic rotor. Yep.

(SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY)

KAMEN: Our trials would be one, two, three machines.

What we're calling the "Alpha Build,"

will be between 50 and 100 identical machines.

In a real factory, in a period of a month,

you could stamp out 10,000 machines,

not one.

The labor cost associated with that 10,000 machines is almost nothing.

To make one more machine then, is the cost of these finished parts,

which we will get down to a few thousand dollars per machine.

This device will be less than half the size,

less than half the weight of the machines

that we used for the Ghana trials.

And the goal is to have them all finished for the next level of testing

in Central America and in Africa.

And if that project goes as we hope,

the next round of development should be relatively high-volume production

to start the serious project of giving water to a few billion people.

KAMEN: I think somebody that's a really big person

is somebody that doesn't mind helping everybody else around them.

A really big person helps everybody else be big,

and doesn't use their bigness to keep everybody else small.

My brother was a big person.

Libby, my niece, is here.

She's been with FIRST her whole life.

She lost a dad.

I lost a brother.

My mom

lost her son.

The whole FIRST community

lost a great resource.

He was a mentor, he was a volunteer,

he was a judge.

He was somebody everybody could aspire to be like.

What I admired about Bart

was he had a little bit of my father in him that I don't have.

That he was so easy-going.

And he was always conscious of making everybody around him feel comfortable,

which was an incredible asset,

since the people around him, most of the time, were little kids,

that would otherwise be scared to death because

they have cancer.

Mmm.

(WOMAN CHUCKLES) Patrick.

WOMAN: Just a month ago. Yeah. Thank you.

(KISSES) You stay very, very healthy.

KAMEN: It never even came into my head

that I'd get old, and not be able to call my brother.

I believe, right now, I can pick up the phone and call him.

I can't...

I can't really believe that that's not the case.

(SIGHS)

KAMEN ON MIC: Life is so short.

And Bart's passing

just gives me even more urgency.

My whole life,

every time I thought of something good and important to do,

I wanted to do it now.

It's not a coincidence I build clocks.

'Cause the world's in a race.

Between all sorts of catastrophes,

and technical expertise.

We can't let catastrophe win.

So time is critical.

KAMEN: Coca-Cola selected ideal locations

for the next level of testing.

Mexico,

South Africa,

Paraguay.

What we're learning is, if there are 206 different countries on this planet,

we have to ask ourselves at least 206 different ways to be successful,

because in each environment, there are different challenges.

KAMEN: The ideal would be a machine that has no weight, no size,

no cost, never breaks down,

is available wherever you need it, all the time, free.

That will never happen.

There is, I think, a very pervasive but naive assumption

that aid means you give things away.

If you give things away,

with this mythical idea

that it should have no cost,

it will end up demonstrating that it had no value.

(CHILDREN CHATTERING)

(TEACHER SPEAKING SPANISH)

KAMEN: It will be those people that are drinking the output of this device

that are protecting it, maintaining it,

in some cases, creating a business around it

and becoming entrepreneurs.

The Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903.

The day after they did that, you didn't see airlines.

You didn't get frequent flyer miles.

In fact, I believe, it was at least a decade after they did that,

before anybody had any commercial use of any airplane.

Where we were with the first machines that you saw in Ghana,

we were like the Wright brothers, with their first flyer.

Where are we now with our Alpha machines?

We're one of those early airplanes with the big propellers, spitting smoke.

Where would we like to be with our next machine?

You know, the dream liner.

Where do we want to be after that?

A spaceship.

I think the reason that water is such a big problem these days

is because all the people in the western world don't see it as a problem.

In fact, they don't even see it at all.

Even here, in the richest country in the world,

our pure clean water isn't as pure and as clean as we thought.

Sadly, most of us will probably come to see a world where

you can't trust tap water anymore.

KATIE COURIC: At least 41 million of us

are drinking water that contains traces of prescription drugs.

Anti-seizure medications, prescription pain killers.

Even the anti-depressant ingredient in Prozac.

KAMEN: There are, literally, for instance, tens of millions of women

that are taking birth control.

And every day, they literally pass through their body, hormones

that municipal water systems can't filter out.

And tiny, tiny, tiny amounts of hormones

have a big effect on your health.

The average age of puberty for young girls in the United States

has been dropping pretty radically.

The problem of global access to water is getting worse everywhere,

including, in the next decade or two, North America.

There will be many places around this country,

where water becomes a serious issue.

Everybody asks me, "Well, why do we call the box SlingShot?"

As a little kid, I was always the smallest kid in my grade,

and I heard the story of David and Goliath,

and to me, the moral of that story was, "Technology is cool."

And people say to me, "How? How did you get that moral out of it?"

I say, "Well, there was this really little guy, David.

"He had this really big problem, Goliath.

"But he had this little thing called the slingshot.

"And that little piece of technology took out that really big problem."

Dean, where are you? Stand up.

Now, let me tell you. (AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)

About seven years ago, I did drink

some of the ugliest, most contaminated water you ever saw.

Dean came and put it in his little machine,

I drank it down, and I'm still here. It works.

(AUDIENCE LAUGHING)

I mean, it works.

I drink it all the time.

It works and it is just an amazing piece of equipment.

KAMEN: You start putting all these pieces together

and the chain will finally go from a crazy idea to, "Of course. It was obvious."

Let's put water machines all over the world.

There's no easier way to wipe out 50% of all human disease.

Let's just do it.

Simple. MAN: Overnight success?

I think in less than 20 years, we're gonna be an overnight success.

(CHILDREN SCREAMING)

KAMEN: We want to be helping get water to everybody on this planet.

It's the right thing to do.

It's simply the right thing to do.

We can do it. Therefore, we should do it.

So why is it prevention to give people clean water?

Call me crazy.

We have a Department of Defense

and we build the ultimate weapons of mass destruction.

But how about if we build weapons of mass construction?

And what if we go around the world and give everybody clean water,

and it says "US" on it, your friend?

Maybe we'll have a Department of Peace.

And maybe we will prevent the wars.

And if we can get these water machines into high volume production,

I think we put them around the world

and there's a way better shot that a large part of two billion people

will be our friends.

I don't have time for things that just don't matter.

So, number one, is I'd like to work on big problems and solve them.

Number two,

is at least I'll be able to say to the world, "I worked on a really big problem.

"I didn't solve it, but I tried. What did you do?"

And at least, I hope in the end, I didn't waste my time.

What I really, really want

is a time machine.

If I could step into some device

and transport myself back

to have a conversation, 2,300 years ago with Archimedes...

Mmm?

"Hey, Archi. What's up with that buoyancy thing?" You know... (CHUCKLES)

I don't know what I'd say. (MAN LAUGHING)

Or if I could go forward even just 100 years,

will they have answers to questions that we simply don't understand now?

And will they be answers that are, "Oh, why didn't we see that?"

MAN: Do you think you could build one?

As I said, whenever you talk about technology,

using a word like "never" always comes back to haunt you.

We will cure every kind of cancer you can think of.

We will make computers that outperform anything you could possibly imagine.

I don't say "never" to just about anything,

but I'll say it's gonna be a long time

before there's a time machine,

especially one that has the beautiful convenience

of what H.G. Wells had in mind.

Get in it, dial in a time, get out.

Get back in, dial in a different time.

Now, that's an invention.

If anybody, or any group of people

come up with a device to do that,

they deserve the whole wall.

Are you ready?

Are we all watching?

This is pressure.

(CLAPS)

MAN: Dean, higher. Oh, I failed!

Oh, all right, all right. (MAN TALKING INDISTINCTLY)

Ready?

(SMACKING LIPS)

You know, I don't want to say anything,

but I think I reached the pinnacle of this.

For you to be thanking me, it makes my brain hurt.

I mean, it's the veterans that gave me the opportunity to do all these things.

And I thank all of you... (AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)

KAMEN: We could empty half of all the beds in all the hospitals in the world

by just giving people clean water.