On Newshub Nation: Lisa Owen interviews scientist and philanthropist Sir Ray Avery
Lisa Owen: Welcome back. Sir Ray Avery is many things — an inventor, a scientist, a philanthropist and a survivor. This week, former Prime Minister Helen Clark called him something else too — a bully. The pair clashed over Sir Ray’s proposed charity concert at Eden Park, an event that’s aimed at raising money to build special incubators to save the lives of premature babies in third world countries. Ms. Clark lives close to the stadium, and says the proposed event would pave the way for more noisy concerts there. Sir Ray Avery joins me now. Good morning, Sir Ray.
Sir Ray Avery: Good morning.
So, Helen Clark’s comments. She said you were being bullying. What’s your response to that?
Well, if I came across as being bullying, I would wholeheartedly apologise. I think if you look at the initiatives that led to that position, if Helen had published - sorry, had just put in a submission like all the other people from Eden Park, nothing would have happened. What Helen did was to go up, not just on the parapet, but on the top of the parapet with the flag waving, saying ‘I’m going to stop Sir Avery’s concert. Right now, in London, you’ve got a whole bunch of people getting ready to have a revolt against Trump, and in his own country, you have all these people who think that what he’s doing is morally wrong, and I think that, in my personal view, what Helen is doing is morally wrong. So I felt that I would have the right to have that same position.
Why do you think it’s morally wrong?
Well, because Helen’s been involved in women’s rights in the UN and so on, and she knows better than most the effect that not having neo-natal care for babies, every woman in a developing country, one in four will know what it’s like to lose a baby, and she knows that, and yet the issue for her is that she actually wants to get rid of Eden Park stadium, and she wants a new stadium. So her driving force is that, and so it’s a non-negotiable thing for her. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to save a million babies or so, that’s not the point. So the point that I was making was her values are not my values.
Why can’t you have your concert somewhere else, Sir Ray?
The reason for that is that the guy that’s coming down is an icon and it takes millions of dollars to—
The guy? So it’s a man?
It’s a guy!
OK.
I can tell you it’s one of the original Band Aid people, and they’re coming down. It’d be a bit like Elvis. If Elvis was alive, he’s coming, so it’s huge. But to do that, it costs millions of dollars. And the only way that that can work is with the seating capacity that Eden Park has, but more importantly, the 50-odd personal suites that they have, so we can actually monetise the thing, which we couldn’t do at Mt Smart. The other thing, of course, is that we’re getting the stadium and things for free. That’s the contribution by the Eden Park board. So I can’t go down to Mt Smart and say ‘Can I do that concert? Can you find me this icon?’ So that arrangement now is in place, and we’d really have to go the wire on it.
How much of the money raised from the concert will go to funding the LifePods? Because that’s another issue that people have raised.
Right, well it’s all interlocked, of course, because we couldn’t do the Telethon if we didn’t have the concert, because the sponsorship wouldn’t be there. The people wouldn’t put their money in from the sponsorship. So, all up, we think we can raise at least $4 million from the collegiate events. The other things that are going on, which is important for people to understand, is we’re actually doing a whole series of things up and down the country celebrating who we are as a country, because this is a special day for us, and so we’re having all these Telethon events, and what you don’t know and what your audience don’t know is that we invented things like instant coffee. We invented the use of the whistle at the end of a rugby match. We invented spreadable butter. We want to go up and down the country showing all of these things — the Sealegs boats, Rocket Man — and we want to go around the country on Telethon and say, ‘on this one day, let’s celebrate who we are as a country’. We’re the cleverest country in the world per head of population, and nobody knows it. You’re inoculated with a sterile hypodermic syringe which was invented by Colin Murdoch. He’s touched more people than anybody else in the world. I want to celebrate that on this wonderful day, and, for me, it’s kind of horrible for people to say ‘We shouldn’t do that.’
Well, it’s interesting you say that in the context of the fact that you settled here in New Zealand because you called it an ‘open can-do country with a can-do attitude’. Are you still feeling that we’ve got a ‘can-do’ attitude?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the support that we’ve had that came out of this is phenomenal. But the bad side of that is all my staff, which work as volunteers, we’ve had to shut down our website, because of the complaints that have come in from some small portion of society who see things a different way. And because we’re covered by NZA, we have to treat those as an internal assault and then we have to file a code for NZA. So that’s been a difficult thing. You know, for me, it’s been disappointing in the sense that anybody would feel like that, you know?
So moving on to the invention part of things and wanting to celebrate that, do you think that you’re born an innovator or you’re taught it?
I was born an innovator in the sense— I think we all come with a CD. You know, you’ve got your own personal CD. But, no, I had the benefit that I wasn’t educated in the current— A good friend of mine is a professor of education, Ken Robinson, and he says that we actually take innovation out of kids by getting them to learn stuff. So, for instance, if you’re predicated on learning maths — a good example with my daughter, she came to me the other day and she said, ‘Dad’ — she’s only six — and she said, ‘Dad I’m having trouble with my seven times table’. And I said, ‘Well, see this thing here? It’s called a calculator. And I’ll show you this.’ And she looked at me and she said, ‘Why am I learning this shit?’ And she’s got a point. You see, the thing is, we focus on the metrics of trying to educate children. The reality is that kids have the most virulent and innate sense of creativity. And when we put them into preschool, they can play with all the toys, and they may invent something—
So how should we be teaching them, then?
Well, what you do is you do applied learning. So you can still teach them maths, but what you do is you make it relative to something. And a good example is Dio — when you do an art class at Dio, you don’t just— You know, in my day, when you did an art class, they’d say, ‘Draw a dog’. Now they’re drawing ‘Draw as many brand icons that you know’. So they’re teaching them to connect with the world. That’s how that knowledge becomes useful.
So, going back to my original question, then — you say, it was born in you, but can you teach it?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, every single invention known to man comes out of one single moment of observation. There’s a guy in the Swiss Alps, and he’s playing with his dog. Dog came back and had all these cockle burrs on it. And he picked one off, went home, looked at it under his microscope, could see all these cockle burrs, and they were just full of hooks.
Yes, like a biddy-bid.
Well, he invented Velcro. So that’s it. And that’s all you need to do. But teaching people the power of observation is a key determinant. And I had that, because I was at school in orphanages in the UK, needed glasses — was short-sighted — had acute glue ear — couldn’t hear what they were saying — so the only thing I had was visual cues. So that taught me to be a perfect observer. And from that, I can become a clever scientist and see things that other people might miss.
Yeah. Well, you did have a rough upbringing, as you mention. You were homeless for a period of time. You opted to go to college over a youth detention centre. I mean, I’ve just been speaking to the Minister for Children, who is talking about kids who have been taken out of their homes, because they’re not up to scratch. I’m wondering — how do we instil resilience like the kind you have exhibited in our kids?
I’m not sure you can, unfortunately. One of the reasons for me running away when I was 14 was my friend committing suicide. And we were both subjected to abuse, but he just couldn’t deal with it. And it was just his nature. And I knew that I couldn’t stay— I stayed a lot of the time just because of him — to look after him. And we actually went to the teacher and said, ‘This guy’s abusing both of us’. And I convinced him to come with me. And that caused this teacher then to take some recommendations against both of us. And he just couldn’t take that, so he committed suicide, and I left. So I don’t think it can. I think one of the reasons I’ve been so successful is that I’m innately a survivor, but I don’t think you can teach anybody that. So for me, this is the thing with my own kids— So, I look at my own kids, and what worries me most about the discussion we’re having now is the acrimony that goes on in the world. I want my two girls to be brought up in a world that’s full of joy and love and caring. And I do worry about what’s out there in the outside world. In our house, it’s full of love and caring and so on.
Well, funny you should say that. You have also said that global leaders could fix all our global problems. What do you see as some of the biggest issues facing us right now?
Well, I think the issues for us are to use our intelligence and our corporate capacities to apply what we do to things that are good for us and our planet, rather than, maybe, something that’s just for entertainment. So, for instance, we could play with those hundred balloons till the cows come home and just put latex around in the landfill. Or we could actually do what I’m doing. I get up in the morning and I make medical products. Because looking after the sick and lame is one of the most primary, important things that we do. The next one is education. I we can educate—
So if it doesn’t have a social conscience, don’t do it, is that what you’re saying?
Yeah, I’m saying if you think about how we started as a society, how we started as a society was there was a guy growing wheat in a field and he got good at it. And the field became so big that he had to get people in to actually get crops in. And then from there, we needed to transport them. So you needed to get cars, so you’ve got cars, so you’ve got all this infrastructure. Then it all got so big that he couldn’t manage it, so he abdicated responsibility to a local council, and now to government. So the things that are important to us as a family have got all diluted. And what I’m trying to do is get back to that, say, let’s do things that are good for us and our planet. And it goes through everything that you do, whether you’re in advertising—I mean I work with some really groovy advertising companies, and I went to them one day and I said, ‘Look, I know that you’re one of the best creative advertising companies in New Zealand, because you’ve won awards for Kentucky Fried Chicken, Jim Bean and Carls Junior, and not going to heaven. But if you work for me for nothing, you will.
All right, well, seeing as you raise heaven, by your own calculations, you say you’ve got around 2000 days left.
Well, it’s 4793. (LAUGHS)
Ok, all right. Well, is that enough? Is that enough to do what you need to?
None of us, normally, have an exit plan. Most people don’t realise they were born with 30,000 days, that’s what you’ve got. So you need to have a plan with what you’re going to do with them, because your exit strategy is the same as mine, you know? You’re going to die. But for most people it’ll be a big bloody surprise. But for me, I know what I want to do with those years. And the answer is, I hope so, because I hope I can get this incubator out at scale, and save millions and millions of people’s lives. And what we’re doing now is planning my exit strategy, because my lovely wife Anna is now coming on board, doing the marketing. And she will be the face that will continue the charity afterwards. We’re actually rebranding my charity, Medicine Mondiale to the Sir Ray Avery Foundation as part of my exit strategy. So I plan my life and I try and make it worth—You know, the only way that I can try to justify my life is, that horrible life when it was really horrible, nobody can really imagine what it’s like to be brutalised for 14 years, systematically. But what it did do was to make an animal that is fearless and knows what it is to do good work. And the only way that I can make sense of that is to do something extraordinary. If I can change the world, that makes that worthwhile.
I want to ask you some very quick questions in the time we’ve got left. A lot of people find you inspirational, but who inspires you?
My children. My children, because I realised how stuffed up I am. Because although I preach trying to be imaginative and creative, when my kids come back to do stuff—Once at a talk I said, ‘I don’t interfere with my kids.’ And that came out so wrong, but what I meant was I let them play. And so they play in the garden. And this is true, if I saw them walking past today with a chainsaw, I’d say, ‘Where you going with that?’ And I wouldn’t interfere, because they’re doing something creative. And, not surprisingly, they’ve broken most of the bones in their body. But they’re happy, and they’re imaginative, and they’ve got great—
They’re not in cotton wool, clearly.
No, well, my eldest daughter came to me and said, ‘I’m fed up with this modelling. I wrote a code, Dad, for a model on a computer. But now I want you to actually make it. Go out and get these motors.’ And I love that.
Wow. And one last question, what do you think is the greatest modern invention?
Modern invention?
Yeah.
The one I’m going to do next. (LAUGHS)
Watch this space.
No, we were doing these nutritional products, which we’re launching. And we think that’ll impact positively on half a billion kids in sub-Saharan Africa in the next 20 years.
Back yourself. Sir Ray Avery, thanks for joining us.
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