 The toilets we sit on and use today are literally cutting-edge technology, but from the 1500s. Let's talk about the origin of the modern toilet. In 1596, Sir John Harrington built the first toilet for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth the First. The difference today, some four or plus years later, is that all of our toilets are connected through a modern sewer system. This pipe runs from the street all the way up to the roof of your house, carries waste out to the sewer. Matter of fact, this pipe will help make your house a healthy place to live in. Your poop goes through the sewage system to an active treatment plant where it's filtered and acted on by bacteria and a lot of water. How much water? 75% of your water bill is the cost of hauling away waste from your toilet to the sewage system. Taking away poop is killing our water supply, but it gets a lot worse than that in the developing world. In the developing world, which has no toilets, when people have to go to the bathroom, they do so in the woods near their homes. Bacteria from that feces enter the water table and cause disease. Globally, waterborne disease kills 4,000 children every single day. So imagine recreating the toilet. A toilet that would not only save water, but save lives. Imagine a toilet is actually able to burn your feces. It turns out that when you go to the bathroom, there is a lot of energy left in your feces about a mega-joule of energy per day, which is enough to power your cell phone and the lights in your home. At the X Prize Foundation, we've been working on the reinvention of the modern-day toilet that will transform how we take care of our solid and liquid waste and actually turn it into energy, drinking water, and fertilizer. We've named this competition a lot of different things. Paper poop, cash for crap. At the end of the day, this is serious business. This is about providing energy, clean drinking water, and health for billions of people around the world. The future of going to the bathroom is a lot brighter than you think. I'm not going to say the future of pooping. I'm sorry. I'm just not going to do that.