Ray is an inventor, a scientist, and an all-around humanitarian.
 
He's going to talk about 2 things: his innovation from an academic scientist to an applied scientist.  Each year, a list gets published of the world's 25 most innovative nations. Sadly, New Zealand doesn't get a mention -- because we're special! We're hidden down here in Antarctica Riviera -- nobody knows we're here!
 

4:30 on a Thursday is the worst time in the week for human concentration -- thank you, Richard!
 
He brought some props: a knife, an apple, a backup apple, and a few props that are so small nobody will ever see.
 

Nigel Parker is here to talk to us about failure, and why failure is the best possible outcome. There will always be naysayers, people who say, "That will never work!" or "What were you thinking?" Thomas Edison had more than 1,000 patents and most of them were failures. He had the idea of a concrete house, which didn't work, so he switched to concrete furniture. What Nigel wants to know is how we handle failure, and how we can learn to handle failure.
 

Wendy's going to discuss that now is a good place, but also the dangers of now and how to excape out of now. They came up with the concept of timelines, and the biggest one they could think of was the timeline of the planet. So she's showing some fossils, the first one is 2.3 BILLION years old. Now she's taking us on a little journey through evolution, with the next fossil being 535 million years old.
 

Welcome to the first ever TEDx conference in New Zealand. We're here to celebrate the spirit of human potential, and we're going to start with a talk by Michael Henderson, a "corporate anthropologist".