Dean Kamen: The emotion behind invention

66,402 views ・ 2010-04-06

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:15
It's not about technology,
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it's about people and stories.
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I could show you
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what recently was on television
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as a high quality video:
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60 Minutes, many of you may have seen it.
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And it was the now director of the entire piece
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of the veteran's administration --
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who, himself, had lost an arm 39 years ago
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in Vietnam --
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who was adamantly opposed to these crazy devices
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that don't work.
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And it turns out that with 60 Minutes cameras rolling in the background,
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after he pretty much made his position clear on this --
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he had his hook and he had his --
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he wore this arm for less than two hours
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and was able to pour himself a drink and got quite emotional over the fact
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that, quote -- his quote --
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it's the first time he's felt like he's had an arm in 39 years.
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But that would sort of be jumping to the middle of the story,
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and I'm not going to show you that polished video.
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I'm going to, instead, in a minute or two,
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show you an early, crude video
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because I think it's
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a better way to tell a story.
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A few years ago I was visited by
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the guy that runs DARPA,
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the people that fund all the advanced technologies
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that businesses and universities probably wouldn't take the risk of doing.
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They have a particular interest in ones that will help our soldiers.
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I get this sort of unrequested -- by me anyway -- visit,
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and sitting in my conference room is a very senior surgeon
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from the military
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and the guy that runs DARPA.
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They proceed to tell me a story which comes down
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to basically the following. We have used such advanced technologies
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now and made them available
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in the most remote places that we put soldiers:
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hills of Afghanistan, Iraq ...
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They were quite proud of the fact that
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you know, before the dust clears,
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if some soldier has been hurt
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they will have collected him or her, they will have brought him back,
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they will be getting world-class triage emergency care
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faster than you and I would be getting it if we were hurt
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in a car accident in a major city in the United States.
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That's the good news.
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The bad news is if they've collected this person
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and he or she is missing an arm or leg,
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part of the face, it's probably not coming back.
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So, they started giving me the statistics on how many of these kids had lost an arm.
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And then the surgeon pointed out, with a lot of anger,
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he said, "Why is it? At the end of the Civil War,
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they were shooting each other with muskets. If somebody lost an arm,
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we gave them a wooden stick with a hook on it.
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Now we've got F18s and F22s,
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and if somebody loses an arm,
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we give them a plastic stick with a hook on it."
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And they basically said, "This is unacceptable,"
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and then the punchline: "So, Dean,
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we're here because you make medical stuff.
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You're going to give us an arm."
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And I was waiting for the 500 pages of bureaucracy,
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paperwork and DODs.
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No, the guy says,
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"We're going to bring a guy into this conference room,
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and wearing the arm you're going to give us,
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he or she is going to pick up a raisin or a grape
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off this table.
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If it's the grape, they won't break it."
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Great he needs efferent, afferent, haptic response sensors.
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"If it's the raisin, they won't drop it."
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So he wants fine motor control: flex at the wrist,
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flex at the elbow, abduct and flex at the shoulder.
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Either way they were going to eat it.
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"Oh, by the way Dean. It's going to fit on a 50th percentile female frame --
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namely 32 inches from the long finger --
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and weigh less than nine pounds."
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50th percentile female frame.
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"And it's going to be completely self contained including all its power."
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So, they finished that. And I, as you can tell,
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am a bashful guy.
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I told them they're nuts.
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(Laughter)
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They've been watching too much "Terminator."
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(Laughter)
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Then, the surgeon says to me,
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"Dean, you need to know
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more than two dozen of these kids have come back
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bilateral."
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Now, I cannot imagine --
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I'm sorry, you may have a better
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imagination than I do --
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I can't imagine losing my arm,
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and typically at 22 years old.
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But compared to that, losing two?
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Seems like that would be an inconvenience.
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Anyway, I went home that night. I thought about it.
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I literally could not sleep
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thinking about, "I wonder how you'd roll over
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with no shoulders."
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So, I decided we've got to do this.
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And trust me, I've got a day job, I've got a lot of day jobs.
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Most of my day job keeps me busy
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funding my fantasies like FIRST and water and power ....
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And I've got a lot of day jobs.
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But I figured I gotta do this.
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Did a little investigation,
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went down to Washington, told them
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I still think they're nuts but we're going to do it.
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And I told them I'd build them an arm.
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I told them it would probably take five years to get through the FDA,
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and probably 10 years to be reasonably functional.
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Look what it takes to make things like iPods.
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"Great," he said, "You got two years."
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(Laughter)
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I said, "I'll tell you what. I'll build you an arm
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that's under nine pounds
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that has all that capability in one year.
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It will take the other nine to make it functional and useful."
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We sort of agreed to disagree.
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I went back and I started putting a team together,
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the best guys I could find with a passion to do this.
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At the end of exactly one year
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we had a device with 14 degrees of freedom,
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all the sensors, all the microprocessors,
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all the stuff inside.
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I could show you it with a cosmesis on it
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that's so real it's eerie, but then you wouldn't see
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all this cool stuff.
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I then thought it would be years
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before we'd be able to make it really, really useful.
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It turned out, as I think you could see
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in Aimee's capabilities and attitudes,
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people with a desire to do something
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are quite remarkable and nature is quite adaptable.
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Anyway, with less than 10 hours of use,
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two guys -- one that's bilateral.
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He's literally, he's got no shoulder on one side,
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and he's high trans-humeral on the other.
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And that's Chuck and Randy together,
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after 10 hours -- were playing in our office.
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And we took some pretty cruddy home movies.
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At the end of the one I'm going to show, it's only about a minute
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and a couple of seconds long,
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Chuck does something that to this day I'm jealous of,
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I can't do it.
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He picks up a spoon, picks it up,
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scoops out some Shredded Wheat and milk,
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holds the spoon level
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as he translates it, moving all these joints simultaneously,
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to his mouth, and he doesn't drop any milk.
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(Laughter)
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I cannot do that.
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(Laughter)
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His wife was standing behind me.
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She's standing behind me at the time
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and she says, "Dean,
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Chuck hasn't fed himself in 19 years.
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So, you've got a choice:
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We keep the arm, or you keep Chuck."
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(Laughter) (Applause)
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So, can we see that?
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This is Chuck showing simultaneous control
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of all the joints.
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He's punching our controls guy. The guy behind him
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is our engineer/surgeon,
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which is a convenient guy to have around.
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There's Randy, these guys are passing a rubber
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little puck between them.
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And just as in the spirit of FIRST,
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gracious professionalism, they are quite proud of this,
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so they decide to share a drink.
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This is a non-trivial thing to do, by the way.
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Imagine doing that with a wooden stick and a hook on the end of it,
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doing either of those.
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Now Chuck is doing something quite extraordinary,
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at least for my limited physical skill.
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And now he's going to do what DARPA asked me for.
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He's going to pick up a grape -- he didn't drop it,
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he didn't break it --
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and he's going to eat it.
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So, that's where we were
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at the end of about 15 months.
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(Applause)
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But, as I've learned from Richard,
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the technology, the processors, the sensors, the motors,
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is not the story.
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I hadn't dealt with this kind of problem
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or frankly, this whole segment
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of the medical world.
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I'll give you some astounding things that have happened
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as we started this.
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After we were pretty much convinced we had a good design,
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and we'd have to make all the standard engineering trade-offs you always make --
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you can always get three out of four of anything you want;
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the weight, the size, the cost, the functionality --
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I put a bunch of guys in my plane
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and I said, "We're flying down to Walter Reed, and we're going talk to these kids,
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because frankly it doesn't matter whether we like this arm.
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It doesn't matter whether the
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Department of Defense likes this arm."
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When I told them that they weren't entirely enthusiastic,
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but I told them, "It really doesn't matter what their opinion is.
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There is only one opinion that matters,
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the kids that are either going to use it or not."
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I told a bunch of my engineers, "Look we're going to walk into Walter Reed,
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and you're going to see people, lots of them,
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missing major body parts.
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They're probably going to be angry, depressed, frustrated.
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We're probably going to have to give them support, encouragement.
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But we've got to extract from them
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enough information to make sure we're doing the right thing."
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We walked into Walter Reed and I could not have been more wrong.
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We did see a bunch of people,
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a lot of them missing a lot of body parts,
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and parts they had left were burned;
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half a face gone, an ear burned off.
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They were sitting at a table. They were brought together for us.
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And we started asking them all questions.
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"Look," I'd say to them, "We're not quite as good as nature yet.
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I could give you fine motor control,
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or I could let you curl 40 pounds;
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I probably can't do both.
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I can give you fast control
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with low reduction ratios in these gears,
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or I can give you power;
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I can't give you both.
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And we were trying to get them to all help us
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know what to give them.
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Not only were they enthusiastic, they kept thinking
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they're there to help us.
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"Well, would it help if I ..."
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"Guys, and woman,
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you've given enough.
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We're here to help you. We need data. We need to know
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what you need."
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After a half an hour, maybe, there was one guy at the far end of the table
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who wasn't saying much.
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You could see he was missing an arm.
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He was leaning on his other arm.
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I called down to the end, "Hey, you haven't said much.
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If we needed this or this, what would you want?"
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And he said, "You know,
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I'm the lucky guy at this table.
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I lost my right arm,
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but I'm a lefty."
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(Laughter)
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So, he wouldn't say much.
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He had a great spirit, like all the rest of them had great spirits.
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And he made a few comments.
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And then the meeting ended. We said goodbye to all these guys.
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And that guy pushed himself back from the table ...
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he has no legs.
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So, we left.
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And I was thinking,
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"We didn't give them support and encouragement;
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they gave it to us.
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They're not finished giving yet."
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It was astounding.
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So, we went back.
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And I started working harder, faster.
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Then we went out to Brooke Army Medical Center.
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And we saw lots of these kids, lots of them.
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And it was astounding
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how positive they are.
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So, we went back,
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and we've been working harder yet.
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We're in clinical trials,
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we've got five of them on people.
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We're screaming along.
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And I get a call and we go back
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to Washington.
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We go back to Walter Reed,
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and a kid, literally,
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20 some-odd days before that
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was blown up.
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And they shipped him to Germany
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and 24 hours later they shipped him from Germany
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to Walter Reed.
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And he was there,
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and they said we needed to come.
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And I went down
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and they rolled him into a room.
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He's got no legs.
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He's got no arms.
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He's got a small residual limb on one side.
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Half of his face is gone,
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but they said his vision is coming back.
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He had one good eye.
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His name is Brandon Marrocco.
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And he said,
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"I need your arms,
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but I need two of them."
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"You'll get them."
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This kid was from Staten Island.
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And he said, "I had a truck,
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before I went over there,
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and it had a stick.
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You think I'll be able to drive it?"
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"Sure."
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And I turned around and went, "How are we going to do this?"
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(Laughter)
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Anyway, he was just like all the rest of them.
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He doesn't really want a lot.
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He wants to help. He told me that
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he wanted to go back
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to help his buddies.
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So, I was on my way out here.
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I was asked to stop at Texas.
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There were 3,500 people,
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the Veteran's Administration,
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U.S. ... just 3,500 at this huge event
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to help the families
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of all the kids --
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some that have died, some that are
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like Brandon --
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and they wanted me to speak.
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I said, "What am I going to say?
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This is not a happy thing. Look, if this happens to you,
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I can give you ... This stuff is
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still not as good at the original equipment."
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"You need to come."
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So, I went.
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And, as I think you get the point,
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there were a lot people there recovering.
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Some further along than others.
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But universally, these people that had been through this
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had astounding attitudes,
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and just the fact that people care
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makes a huge difference to them.
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I'll shut up, except one message
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or concern I have.
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I don't think anybody does it intentionally,
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but there were people there literally talking about,
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"Well, how much will they get?"
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You know, this country is involved as we've all heard,
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in this great healthcare debate.
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"Who is entitled to what?
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Who is entitled to how much?
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Who is going to pay for it?"
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Those are tough questions.
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I don't have an answer to that. Not everybody
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can be entitled to everything simply because you were born here.
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It's not possible. It would be nice
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but let's be realistic.
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They were tough questions. There's polarized groups down there.
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I don't know the answers.
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There are other questions that are tough.
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"Should we be there?
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How do we get out?
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What do we need to do?" There's very polarized
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answers to that question too,
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and I don't have any answers to that.
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Those are political questions, economic questions,
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strategic questions.
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I don't have the answer. But let me give you a simple
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concern or maybe statement, then.
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It is an easy answer.
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I know what these kids deserve
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on the healthcare side.
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I was talking to one of them,
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and he was really liking this arm --
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it's way, way, way better than a plastic
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stick with a hook on it --
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but there's nobody in this room that would rather have that
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than the one you got.
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But I was saying to him, "You know,
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the first airplane
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went 100 feet in 1903.
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Wilbur and Orville.
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But you know what? It wouldn't have made an old pigeon jealous.
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But now we got Eagles out there,
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F15s, even that Bald Eagle.
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I've never seen a bird flying around at Mach 2.
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I think eventually we'll make these things extraordinary."
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And I said to that kid,
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"I'll stop when your buddies
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are envious of your Luke arm
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because of what it can do, and how it does it.
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And we'll keep working. And I'm not going to stop working
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until we do that."
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And I think this country
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ought to continue its great debate,
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whining and complaining, "I'm entitled." "You're a victim."
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And whining and complaining about what our foreign policy ought to be.
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But while we have the luxury of whining and complaining about
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who's paying for what and how much we get,
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the people that are out there
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giving us that great privilege of whining and complaining,
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I know what they deserve:
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everything humanly possible.
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And we ought to give it to them.
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19:15
(Applause)
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About this website

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