Interview with Dean Kamen at the 1997 FIRST Competition
April 13, 1997      Orlando, FL

[Transcribed from a video produced by GM Powertrain.  Dean was aware that he was being interviewed by a crew from General Motors]

	The purpose of FIRST is remarkably simple.  We think that almost every serious parent, and every serious company, and the government in this country realize that we have major problem in terms of competitiveness of the next generation of people growing up in this country compared to that of the rest of the world.  And it reflects itself in people becoming concerned about the standard of living, many other things.
	Almost every one of those groups either does not know what to do about the problem or thinks we’ve got to keep throwing more resources at the supply side.  Nobody has, I think, properly addressed the problem by saying its a demand issue.  Sure, we’d like more computers in the schools.  Sure, we’d like all those things that people are working at.  But you know what, you can take the most impoverished inner city school in this country, and you still get great basketball players out of it.  They practice on macadam, they practice in the street.  You get great football players, and they haven’t seen grass, because they have desire, and desire is worth a whole lot more than opportunity to somebody that really wants to succeed.  And in a country the spends 600 billion dollars a year on education, its hard for me to believe that a kid just can’t have access to a book.
	The fact is, these kids are so inundated by distractions about what’s really important in life.  I mean, there was a Super Bowl when I was a kid, but it didn’t bring the country to its knees.  I mean, there’s not a kid in this country that doesn’t know who Shaquille O’Neal is, and there isn’t a kid in this country who doesn’t know who Michael Jordan is.  And I doubt there are too many kids in this country today that know who invented the CAT scanner.  We know who is winning the Super Bowl.  Who is winning the race to the superconductor?
	The kids in this country have the advantage over most of the world in that the media age has made life seem glamorous and exciting, and its sports figures, and its entertainers.  And the consequences of that, though, is that they don’t know what’s really important to do with their time as kids.
	And if you spend the time between five years old and seventeen years old dribbling, its a little too late to decide “now I need a job.”  It would be as silly as getting to seventeen and saying “I think I’ll take up athletics and be a star.  Now, what is this thing called a football?”  You gotta start when you’re five years old.
	Well, something in our culture has gone awry, and a culture gets what it celebrates.  And this country celebrates the wrong things.  And so kids focus on the wrong things.  Particularly, we don’t have any “Leave it to Beaver” families anymore, where dad comes home every night, and mom comes every night and says “yes, you can play a little bit.  Now, go do your homework.”  So with that as a backdrop I said lets put an organization together that focuses on demand.
	Well, if you want little kids to play football, you don’t show them other little kids playing football.  You don’t make it the job of the teachers - they’re educators, not salesmen.  You don’t say to the gym teacher, make it exciting enough so they’ll show up four hours early.  You want little kids to play football, you show them the NFL.  These guys make a million bucks a year, they’re the best athletes in the world.  You show ‘em that, they want to go out, they dream about it.  They’ll work at it all day.  They’ll work at it all weekend.
	Well, you want little kids to want to be scientists, engineers, technically competent citizens, show ‘em the NFL of smarts!
	Well, if General Motors, and Boeing, and IBM, and AT&T, if those guys don’t have the NFL of smarts, we all ought to hang it up.  If they do, you ought to take those people, put them in front of kids, and say these people are the people you want to grow up to be.  And by the way, when you put those people in front of them, they’re going to see that some of those people are minorities, some of those people are women.  Some of those people are very young, just like the athletes they see.
	Because the stereotype that these kids see of science and engineering is you’ve got to be an old, white, middle aged, male, anti-social guy, with a white lab coat, you’ve got to have a German accent, you’ve got to be crazed, and you’re trying to destroy the world.  That’s a scientist.  And, by the way, girls can’t really do math, and algebra.  And, by the way, you’ve got to be gifted to be a scientist.  You’ve got to be smart.  But anybody can learn to play football, or dribble, if they work.
	And the great irony of that, of course, is unless you happen to be seven feet tall with some really peculiar genuine gifts, physical gifts, its not that much, you could dribble the rest of your life, you’re not going to make it as a basketball player.
	But if you work hard, if you put that kind of effort into studying, almost anybody is going to be capable of developing enough skills to make a very very nice career for themselves.
	But kids never see that side.  They don’t see engineers and scientists as young people and as attractive people.  They just don’t see it.
	So I said, well, that’s easy, we live in a media age, these other things have literally pushed out of even their consciousness all that’s really important, all the excitement of being creative.  So, lets push it all back in using the same thing, lets make a competition.  Lets make it every bit as exciting as the Super Bowl.  Lets make it a double elimination tournament, and lets bring the best of the best of these companies together, and lets put their people on display to these kids.  And lets let these kids see that they can be coached by engineers, not just by guys that can tell them how to run and jump.  And that they can be part of team that can see the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat in a mental process.
	And so I went to some of the big companies the first year, and tried to convince them we could do this.  But I mean, we believe our own bravado in this country.  I think most of the big companies didn’t really believe you could make a science fair much different than a science fair.  But I have to tell you though, General Motors, through Delco, was one of our first sponsors, six years ago.  Each year, almost every big company we’ve gotten involved comes back.  And they come back with more teams.  The first year we had 19 teams and we were in a little gym in New Hampshire.  This year, we have 156 teams from 37 states, and Disney has told us this is the largest non-Disney-owned event ever to happen on their property.  And its about technology.  And its going to give these kids something that’s really valuable.  And General Motors, as you know, Delco, and Powertrain, and Delphi, has been super.
	So, why did we do it?  We did it because something needs to compete for the attention of kids with the distractions that they get.  And the distractions at this point aren’t even implicit.  There are major companies out there telling kids things like “life is short - play hard.”  No!  Life is short - work hard!  Life’s going to be a lot shorter if you don’t.  And it will be a lot less fun.
	Well, who’s out there telling them that?  Do you expect the Department of Education to compete with, you know, the NCAA and the Olympic Committee?  They can’t!  Then you complain that the schools aren’t doing their jobs?  Well, these kids don’t care about that.
	We don’t complain that the football coach isn’t doing his job.
	Somebody’s got to say to these kids this is what’s important.  If you opened up a major newspaper tomorrow morning and it said, geez, the United States is supposed to finish seventeenth at the Olympics - in everything - you wouldn’t tolerate it.  But, for the last ten years, the United States has finished seventeenth in math and science competence in all the kids from grades one through nine.
	Seventeenth.  That puts us somewhere behind Paraguay.  We’re not saying, well the Japanese are a little bit more literate society these days, or maybe the Germans, we’re saying seventeenth.
	Now, we want the highest standard of living, and these days, the only way you’re going to create that is by creating that wealth.  And the only way you can create wealth anymore is knowledge.  The industrial age has turned into the knowledge age.  That’s a bad time for a democracy to end up slipping to number seventeen.
	And these big companies have a vested interest in not letting that happen.  They have the resources, the marketing clout, the role models, to reverse this.  I mean, these are the companies that sponsor all the sporting events, they are!
	You know, sometimes I think of these giant companies and their CEO’s, sit around and worry about what are we going to do, and they put a little foundation together and supply money to education.  And then their marketing horsepower goes out and they’re like volunteer firemen on the weekend and professional arsonists all week!  I mean, companies like GM can instantly create demand for excitement and excellence in engineering if they put the same marketing horsepower they have - you know, they end their ads with “proud sponsor of the U.S. Olympics.”  What are they proud of?  Shotputters?  They certainly improve my quality of life!
	Here’s a company that builds the most sophisticated technology in the world and who do they have telling you to buy their products, and what do they finish their ads by saying they’re proud of?  A shotputter.  A track star.
	I mean, when is GM going to say “proud sponsor of FIRST?”  When are they going to use these role models as their heroes?  And, you know, “that Delco motor is the reason I won this competition.”  Or, “this battery...”  I think it would be very easy, if they get the right mindset, for corporate America to do for science and technology what they’ve done for athletics.
	And FIRST, really to me, if its successful, will end up being nothing more than a coalition of companies that become the NCAA of smarts, the Olympic Committee of technology.  And if it does that, it will create demand among these kids.  And then they can be confident that the 600 billion dollars they’re spending every year on education will have some positive value.
	Imean, I don’t know of any giant company that would spend 600 billion dollars on the supply side of its product and have no marketing budget.  That’s what the United States does with education.  There is no marketing budget.  There’s no institution in this country that spends a penny on trying to explain to kids that it is important, that it is fun, that it is rewarding, that it is accessible to you, to be smart.

	The goal of FIRST is that, after kids see this stuff, particularly kids that might have never met an engineer, walk out of this saying, and if you interview the thousands of kids here you’ll see its working, that they walk out of here saying “I could do that.  This is fun.  Now I know why you have to learn algebra.  Because you can’t figure out power without multiplying volts times amps.  You can’t figure out torque without multiplying a force times a distance.  You can’t figure out whether the arm on that robot is going to get there or not unless you know how to figure out the sine of thirty degrees, and do some trigonometry.  And wow, these engineers can do powerful things, because they have an education.  And they also look like they’re having a lot of fun doing it.  And there’s only a few hundred jobs every year made in the NFL, and right now we’re 560,000 people short for open technical jobs in the United States.  And by the year 2000 it will be a couple of million.”
	Now that’s a problem for these companies, but that’s an opportunity for these kids.  But they don’t even know it.  And this organization will help identify the problem and it will help address the problem.  And I think its for that reason that a lot of these big companies are starting to help us.