Avoid Aging Through Technology with Aubrey de Grey
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
The Laws of Physics is the number one cause of aging. This means that it doesn’t matter if the subject is biologically alive or not, everything is subject to aging caused mainly by the damage that occurs through the normal operation of a subject through a natural course of time. As Aubrey de Grey would put it, if we can fix a car or an air plane when its parts are damaged and defective, we can do so too with the human body. But the human is different from a machine so defeating biological aging, while it is possible with today’s technology and as it progresses, will not happen overnight.
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Today’s guest on The Successful Pitch is Aubrey de Grey, who is the Founder of SENS, Sens.org. His whole research and philosophy is we can stop aging by figuring out how to repair and rebuild the cells in our body, much like a car or an airplane gets replaced with new engines. He has a very controversial premise that we could live to be as long as a thousand years, but it won’t happen overnight. He’s given a TED Talk that has over 3 million views, and he is a speaker around the world talking about how we can deal with aging and then the implications that it may or may not have on overpopulation. He’s got some great insights on whether you should choose to freeze your body or not, and about changing people’s whole thought process of, “Will I be bored if I was to live longer than a certain age?” Find out what he has to say.
Listen To The Episode Here
Avoid Aging Through Technology with Aubrey de Grey
I’m honored to have Aubrey de Grey, who’s a British gerontologist who’s drawn a roadmap to defeat biological aging. As an English biomedical gerontologist, he claims that humans can live for a thousand years. Through his foundation, he’s drawn a roadmap to defeat this biological aging that we all simply take for granted as a given. He first authored research that claimed the indefinite postponement of aging may be within sight back in 2002. In fact, he’s given a TED Talk on this. It’s got over 3 million views. I’ve watched it myself. I’ve had the honor and privilege of sitting next to him at a lunch, and he’s captivating and fascinating. In the fifteen years since, his reputation among the scientists has moved from being one of somewhat of a ridicule to being one of the most powerful and respected in the industry. In 2009, he formed the public non-profit SENS, which stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, and has enlisted millions in support from a handful of billionaires and entrepreneurs including Peter Thiel, Jason Hope, and Michael Greve. Welcome to the show, Aubrey.
Thanks for having me.
You are certainly someone who is disruptive. In the startup world, that’s what everyone is looking for. Let’s start with your own background. I’d love to ask my guests their own story of origin. Take us back to when you were growing up in England and how you first thought of your interest in whether it was biology or aging in general.
My original interest in aging did not begin when I was a kid. The reason it didn’t was because I didn’t think there was any disagreement about it. I went through my first 25 or more years of life assuming that everybody understood that aging is the world’s most important problem, and that people in biology and in medical research would be working as hard as possible to try to fix it. I only became aware that that wasn’t true when I met and married a biologist who’s a lot older than me. She was already a full professor in San Diego, and through her, I met a lot of other biologists. I discovered that none of them thought that aging was particularly important or particularly interesting, and I was completely gobsmacked by this. I had no idea that that could possibly be the case. After a couple of years of gradually coming to terms with it, I came to the conclusion that I had to switch fields. I was previously working in artificial intelligence per se, which is another area where I felt that there was a serious problem for humanity. It’s the problem of having to spend so much of one’s time doing stuff that one wouldn’t do unless one was being paid for it, but we need more automation to fix that. That was clearly only the world’s second most important problem. I was in a fortunate position where I was able to switch fields easily to construct a whole new career for myself in my spare time.
Are there some similarities in what you’re doing with artificial intelligence with your initial interest in anti-aging? I don’t know if anti-aging is even the right term. Is artificial intelligence helping in your research?
In the early stages after I switched fields, it definitely helped a lot. What I was able to do was approach the problem of aging in a way that benefited from my own background. It was a very different background from what everybody else in the field had. All the people had been biologists all their lives. I was able to be more of an engineer, to think in terms of putting two and two together in different ways than what typical career biologists would do. A number of the ideas I put forward in the first few years of my entry into gerontology were things that were well-received. The career biologists were saying, “This guy is from a completely different area and he’s come in and he happens to have the ideas that we ought to have had. He must be very smart,” so I rose to a level of quite general respect very quickly indeed in gerontology. Then after five years or so in the field, I started to become a serious troublemaker, and things changed a bit, but here we are.
Let’s talk about how you got approached to do your TED Talk and tell us that story and why you think so many people have watched it.
I got approached because I was asked to speak in 2003 at a TED-like conference called PopTech, which happens every year in Camden, Maine up in the extreme northeast. Chris Anderson, the guy who runs TED, was there. He was scouting for speakers and he saw my talk and he thought, “This guy could be good,” so that’s how I ended up speaking at TED. It was the combination of a rather rapid sequence over a period of only a year or two of moving from being known only by people who would call themselves futurists through to speaking as increasingly mainstream thing. The reason why it’s been so popular is because everybody wants to know about aging and about whether we’re going to fix it. The problem is that they still also want to maintain some emotional distance from the question, not think about it except as entertainment.
Let’s talk about some of the challenges that people have. When we were talking at lunch, you said you come up with something where you would just say to someone, “What if I could give you an extra ten years, would you be interested then?,” which seems to be a little bit more of a bite-sized concept versus living to be a thousand.
It’s difficult to square the circle for me, because you’re absolutely right that when one talks about modest postponement of aging, one gets a very different reception than if one talks about indefinite postponement. However, I have two difficulties that I have to grapple with if I attempt that. The first one is that there are lots of other people out there talking about modest postponement of aging. I need to get people to listen to me and understand that what I’m proposing is more realistic and has greater potential than what other people are suggesting. The other problem I have is that as a scientist, I have trouble not telling the truth. If I know perfectly well that the technologies that we’re working on do have the potential to deliver indefinite postponement of aging, I cannot go on stage or on camera and say, “This will give us ten years,” and if someone said, “Why wouldn’t it give us a hundred years?,” because I’ve waved my hand.
Have you had to learn or craft your storytelling skills to get people to understand the science?
[Tweet “If you can’t explain it clearly, you don’t understand it.”]
I have. The thing about anything in science or technology is, I think Francis Crick was the person who said this best, he said, “If you can’t explain your work to a waitress or to a non-specialist, then you don’t understand it yourself.” I certainly haven’t found it all that difficult. I have increasingly refined the way in which I tell the story, the way in which I introduce the ideas just by trial and error, but by and large, making it simple enough to be comprehensible to non-specialists has not been too difficult.
Tell us how your organization SENS started.
The first organization that we began was the Methuselah Foundation. That was the organization, 501(c)(3) public charity, that I founded together with a guy named Dave Gobel back in 2003. Back then, I was pretty much unknown. That was a couple of years before my TED Talk. We had no money, so we couldn’t fund research. What we could do was get the word out, to raise the profile of this whole field. The way we did it was by creating this organization that administered a prize. We would say, “If you can beat the world record for mouse longevity, then we will give you some money.” Of course the amount of money that we were able to give would depend on how much money people gave us to increase the prize pot. This worked rather well, and we were able to bring in millions of dollars over the first couple of years in which we ran this thing.
Around 2005 or so, we started to use some of that money to fund research, because we had structured the prize in such a way that there was no way we would need to give it all out, whatever happened in terms of breaking the world record. We got to a point around 2007 to 2008, where we would do these two activities. We were running these prizes, and also we were doing quite a bit of research. We wanted people to give us money for each of those things, and it worked, but we were not bringing very much money in terms of growing the rate of growth. We were not accelerating. This was a source of great surprise to us, because we had in 2006 brought in one very high profile and very large donor in the form of Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook. Around 2007 or 2008, he was riding high in other ventures as well. He had a hedge fund that was outperforming absolutely everybody else.
When I brought him on board, my take was that my fundraising job is done. A billionaire will be lining up. Of course it didn’t happen. Eventually around 2008, we decided that the main thing that we were doing wrong was we were giving schizophrenic messaging. We felt that we had to be quite glitzy and populist and superficial while we’re selling the prize, because the idea was to get people interested who didn’t want to know about science and they were just enthused. At the same time, we had to be the opposite. We have to be very staid and serious when we were talking about science that we were funding and getting people convinced that we were funding the correct science.In the end, a solution, which was a bit drastic, but everybody concluded in hindsight that it had been the right thing to do, was to split the foundation in two. We created SENS Research Foundation as an offshoot from the Methuselah Foundation. Both organizations very much still exist and we obviously have identical missions and we talk to each other a lot, but no overlap of personnel. I am the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, but I only have an advisory role at Methuselah.
That’s such a valuable takeaway for everybody, because when you are pitching to get someone to join your team, pitching to get hired, or pitching to get your startup funded, if you have schizophrenic messaging, you confuse people. I find, more often than not, that the confused mind just says no without asking for clarification, because people are sometimes embarrassed to ask, “I don’t understand this.” Regarding aging as if I am a fifth grader or a waiter that you’re speaking to, what would you say is the number one cause that causes our bodies to age as we spend more time on the planet?
The number one cause of aging is the law of physics. In other words, aging is not something that is specific to living organism. It is fundamentally the same process in a living organism as it is in any simple inanimate man-made machine like a car or an airplane. It’s just a fact of physics that any machine with moving parts, whether or not it’s alive, is going to do itself damage as a consequence of its normal operation. That damage is going to start to be self-inflicted right from the beginning when the machine is created, and it is going to carry on accumulating throughout the lifetime of the machine. Any machine is set up to tolerate a certain amount of damage without a significant impact in performance, but only a certain amount. Eventually the amount of damage accumulates beyond that threshold, and the machine stops working so well, and eventually it stops working at all.
Defeating Biological Aging: Any machine is set up to tolerate a certain amount of damage without a significant impact in performance, but only a certain amount.
I love that. Your car can get in an accident and still be fixed. You might need new tires, and after a certain mileage, you might need a new engine. In the case of a human, we might need a new heart or this new technology, the stem cells, that might help us fix what’s decaying. Is that accurate?
That is accurate. That means when we want to drill down to the question of how we go about keeping people healthy in old age, we just have to characterize what damage the body is doing to itself in the course of its normal operation, and figure out ways to repair each of those types of damage. Of course the human body is much more complicated than a car or an airplane or any simple man-made machine, and therefore the types of damage are also many and varied. That’s why we haven’t been able to do it yet. The question then is how complicated it is and how hard is it. The central message of SENS, which I first put forward in 2000, is that the damage is complicated, but it’s manageable. We can essentially describe the taxonomy of damage, where all the various types of damage fall into seven major categories, and for each category, there is a generic approach to implementing this repair.
You have this wonderful way of phrasing adding on chunks of time. Your prediction of four digits comes from the second phase, where you say if you’re 60 and you get this therapy that makes you biologically 30. Then by the time you’re biologically 60 again, you’re chronologically 90. Can you expand on that a little bit? Because that whole premise is easier for us to digest in chunks like that and it’s fascinating.
It is very much very often oversimplified and sensationalized and that is one of the big messaging problems that I’ve always had. The therapies that we are working on are therapies that will repair damage in the body fairly well, but they will certainly not be 100% comprehensive and perfect. In other words, they will fix most of the damage that the body does to itself, but there will be bits of difficult damage that the body is still accumulating because the therapies just don’t work on them. That means that if we implement this therapy, it doesn’t matter how often we apply them, we could be applying them every year to the same people and eliminating most of the damage each year. Nevertheless, after the age of 90, the person is still going to be biologically 60 rather than 30, because the difficult damage that the therapy doesn’t work on will have accumulated so that it’s overall load is as much as a regular 60-year old today would have when the difficult damage and the easy damage added together.
That means that by the time this person who gets the therapy at age 60 is chronologically 90, we had better have improved therapies, because the first therapy won’t work anymore. The good news of course is that 30 years is a very long time in technology, including medical technology, which means that the chances are vanishingly low that we will not have made such an improvement enough to be able to ensure that this person will not be biologically 60 for the third time until they are chronologically 150 or whatever. However, what it means is that when people don’t put any of that detail into a description of what I say, then the way it comes over is that I say people alive today have a good chance of living to a thousand. People think that what I’m saying is that within the next couple of decades, we will have the therapies that will allow them to live to a thousand, which in fact I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that we will simply stay one step ahead of the problem as time goes on.
It’s a huge distinction. Let me ask you another question. How do you see this being implemented? Would it only be the billionaires and people like that who can afford to have these therapies, not the entire population will be extending their lifetime until it gets to a tipping point?
I’m absolutely certain that these therapies will be available to everybody who is old enough to need them almost instantly after they become available to anybody. The reason I’m sure of that is because we will see them coming. The difference between this technology and technologies that have come into existence in the past is that those technologies have come into existence suddenly. Nobody saw them coming. Society hasn’t prepared to make the most of them and we have to get there incrementally by the technology being progressively improved and made cheaper and some of trickle-down effect. Whereas here, everything is happening in the limelight and in the public eye right from the beginning when things are not even being tested in clinical trials yet.
First of all, in the expert biology of aging community and then from there, people in the general public will be increasingly aware of the timeframe of how close we’re getting to having these therapies and how much impact those therapies will have. That of course will alter the extent to which the public advocates for access to these things. It will determine what they vote for. It will determine what the economics are all about. By the time the therapy arrives, all of the chaos and the debate about how to make sure these things are universally available will have already occurred. All the required front loaded investment and infrastructure and training of medical personnel and so on that would be needed in order to make these things available to everybody will have been done.
This is a personal question that somebody else might have as well. What are your thoughts on these people who think, “I’m going to freeze myself, and so 20 or 30 years or more from now when they figured out how to solve whatever my disease is,” do you think that’s viable?
It’s becoming viable. Cryonics, the idea of taking someone who has just been declared legally dead and arresting the process of subsequent decay by cooling with liquid nitrogen temperatures makes perfect sense in principle, because certainly at liquid nitrogen temperatures, no further decay occurs. The difficulty is number one, the person, once they’ve been declared legally dead, they’re fairly sick. You don’t get declared legally dead easily. Secondly, there is a lot of additional damage that is done to the body in the process of solidifying them, getting them down to liquid nitrogen temperatures. There used to be a huge problem of ice crystal formation, which causes huge damage at the molecular and cellular level inside biological tissues. That problem has been solved. We now have elaborate cocktails of cryoprotectants that allow the biological tissue to solidify as a glass rather than as a crystal, which eliminates that problem entirely.
However, those cryoprotectants are very mildly toxic, and that’s bad enough because you have to use very high concentrations of them. We have a completely different problem that’s not a chemical problem, namely cracking. Thermal stresses occurring and causing the fractures. We need to solve better those problems; however, great progress has been made in that area as well. In fact, a company that’s been out from SENS Research Foundation which is being run by the person who used to be our chief operating officer is leading a completely new way of essentially completely avoiding that problem. The reason that has been able to become a company rather than just some long-term charity like the cryonics companies is that they want to sell organ preservation. If you can cryo‑freeze a kidney or a heart or liver or whatever, then you can have whole banks of these things and you can completely solve the problem that we have today of thousands and thousands of people dying because they are on a waiting list, because there’s no one sufficiently immune‑compatible to them that has donated the organ they need. That’s moving forward. As of today, it’s not clear whether anybody who has been cryo-freezed out will ever be able to be woken up, but getting close.
What a fascinating answer because you are one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve ever encountered on this topic, anticipating the problems and already knowing what the solutions are that are coming. It’s also a great example of how fast technology is changing to adapt to fixing these kinds of problems not only around being frozen but also aging. Let’s use an easy example, like “I don’t want to have to wait in line in Las Vegas for an hour to get a cab from the airport to my hotel or standing in the rain in New York.” Now, Uber solves that problem. Or Amazon is going to say, “We can have your products delivered to you with a drone.” “That sounds great. I don’t have to leave my house or get it instantly,” but then the drone problem becomes a problem because suddenly the FAA gets involved. In China, they don’t have the same regulations, so they’re able to do it there before here.
In this particular case, because we’ve never even considered this a problem that could ever be solved, you’re starting to say, “No, aging is solvable. We could live to be a thousand,” then a whole lot of other resistance, once the disbelief gets addressed, comes up. What about overpopulation? Will that restrict the number of kids people have? It just creates a whole another set of objections. Normally you think when you solve a problem, everyone’s like, “Let’s embrace it,” and off and running, but what I see here is that you have double challenges. First, you’ve got to get people to believe it’s possible and then the second part is do we even want it. How do you address this concern of overpopulation?
[Tweet “What if the problems of aging were solved?”]
Let me step back a couple of steps and address the more general question first. You’re absolutely right that when people are confronted with arguments that they think might be correct to do with the feasibility of bringing aging under medical control, they do very rapidly switch as they start to have questions about the desirability of bringing aging under medical control. The problem here is that those two things are very closely intertwined. They don’t sound as though they should be intertwined, but in people’s head, they are. Largely because they don’t want to get their hopes up, people will tend to have extremely violent knee-jerk reaction against either the feasibility or the desirability, basically because they’ve already got an opinion about the other. They will say, “I can’t be bothered to think seriously about whether there will be overpopulation or whether that problem is a serious one because I don’t believe you when you say you could do this.” Similarly, the same people will say, “I don’t want to think about whether there’s any truth in your approach to doing this, because it would be a bad idea anyway.” I spend a lot of my time trying to force people to address these two questions separately from each other. It turns out to be very difficult to do that.
Since you ask about overpopulation, let me just tell you my standard answer, and my answer comes in three parts. We probably are not going to have this problem at all because number one, as people’s status get more prosperous and women got more opportunities in life, it seems that almost universally, women choose to have fewer children in the first place and they choose to have them later. Of course when we don’t have aging, we also won’t have menopause, so women can have children a great deal later if they want to. That’s the first thing. In addition to that, the reason why we’re probably not going to have another population problem is because other technologies are coming along which are going to increase the carrying capacity of the planet far more rapidly than the population of the planet could possibly increase, even if we didn’t have a reduction in fertility. I’m talking about things like renewable energy and artificial meat and desalination and such like. These things are going to reduce the average amount that somebody creates pollution, and therefore they will increase the number of people that the planet can sustain with an acceptable level of environmental impact.
That’s all answer number one. Answers number two and three are not only answers to the other population concern, but answer to all of the other concerns that you might have about whether this is a good idea, whether we might create problems as a side effect of solving the problem we have today. The first of those is sense of proportion. The question is how bad, even in the worst case scenario, could the problems be that we might create? How bad is the problem of overpopulation, even if we didn’t have these advantages I’m talking about, that we therefore ended up having to choose. Choice number one would be having fewer children than we would like and choice number two would be having people carry on and dying of Alzheimer’s disease and all the other things we currently die of. You have to make an honest and sincere case that having fewer children than what we’d like is even worse than everyone getting these diseases of old age. Nobody has ever had the guts to come out and tell me that that’s what they’re genuinely think.
The reason I say this is a generic objection to these concerns is because it applies equally. If your concern is not overpopulation but rather inequality of access or dictators living forever or boredom or whatever.
On top of all that, even if you are not completely convinced that the problem of aging is worse than any of the problems that might replace it could be, there’s also the question of the entitlement to make the choice. If we say, “Overpopulating, let’s not go there. Let’s not develop these therapies,” what’s going to happen is the therapy would be developed at some time, but the development will be delayed. That means that there will be an entire cohort of humanity which would have had access to these therapies if we had gone on and developed them quickly as we could, but which will not have access and will have to suffer an unnecessarily early and painful death just like their forefathers did.
The question is do we have the right to condemn those people to that situation? I say that it’s bleeding obvious that we don’t have that right, but they have the right to choose based on the information available to them. For example, whether or not we have developed those technologies that will revert overpopulation, they have the right to choose whether or how to use these therapies, rather than us making that choice for them.
You hit on one word that jumped out at me, which is boredom. Part of the knee-jerk reaction to living past a certain age is we see people in their 90s and for the few exceptions of the Norman Lear’s and Betty White’s of the world, it doesn’t look like it’s a very happy existence. They’re in a lot of pain and their life is very small, etc. There are other obviously exceptions, I just gave two. If people frame their world around, “I’m going to work until I’m this age, 65, and then I’m going to have maybe another 20 or 30 years to retire and enjoy my life and not have to work and travel and do whatever else I want, so I need to have enough money to last me that long.” If you upend that whole premise, they’re like, “I’ve got to keep working? Or I can’t possibly save enough money to live past that age. What if I get bored after I’ve traveled everywhere?” That boredom factor/running out of money factor is a whole another psychological thing that pushes people’s buttons. I just love that you brought it up. Someone like you obviously would never get bored. What advice do you have for people when someone was honest enough to say, “I’m not sure I want to live a long time, because what if I get bored?” What would you say to them?
There are a couple of ways to answer that question. The first one is my sense of proportion again. One of my friends and colleague, Brian Kennedy, was onstage with me at a debate and somebody asked him this basic question. He said, “If I’ve got the choice between getting Alzheimer’s at age 80 or being bored at 850, I don’t think I was going to choose.” The sense of proportion argument is fairly strong in this regard. I can address the question head on and say yes, there is a problem of people being bored, and we have that problem today. The question is what do we do about it? Of course the answer is we look at who is bored and who is not bored and we identify what the distinguishing characteristics are. The overwhelming distinguishing characteristic is education. The better educated somebody is, the more equipped they are to make the most of what life has to offer. This means therefore that there will be increasing value in investing in not only kid, but of course adult education and retraining and so on, so that people have the opportunity to seek out novelty and do more with their lives and be more inspired however long they live.
Defeating Biological Aging: The better educated somebody is, the more equipped they are to make the most of what life has to offer.
How can people follow what you’re doing? This podcast is heard in over 60 countries. My intent and what I would love to have happen is somebody will hear this, send it to somebody else, who can then say, “I want to donate to what you’re doing with this amazing non-profit.” Tell people how to find you and follow you.
The easiest thing to do is go to Sens.org. Our website has absolutely everything you can imagine. It’s got huge amounts of information about the science that we perform, both written for a specialist audience and for a completely lay audience, depending on what you want. We talk about all the other stuff we do. It’s got lists of where I’m going to be speaking, and it has a nice big friendly donate button on the front page.
Aubrey, I can’t thank you enough for spending your incredibly valuable time with me and the audience of The Successful Pitch. I hope and intend to do my part to get your message out, because what you’re doing is not just revolutionary, but has a huge philanthropic and life-changing message that if we can just keep our minds open and curious enough to follow someone with your sense of integrity and bravery, I want to be part of supporting that vision.
I’m very grateful. You certainly have skills that we could use. We definitely need people who can tell our story in their own way and persuasive ways and bring a greater audience in, and the more we can do that, the better.
Fantastic.
Links Mentioned:
- Aubrey de Grey
- TED Talk – Aubrey’s TED Talk link
- Methuselah Foundation
- SENS Research Foundation
- Sens.org
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Build A Big Network By Becoming A Friend Of A Friend with David Burkus
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
A lot of successful business owners keep saying that for you to get ahead of everyone else, you need to see the disruption before it happens. But how exactly do you do that? David Burkus, the world’s top business thought leader believes that best way to do this is creating connections to build a network so you can see what other people are seeing and then you can connect the dots to the disruption. This authentic and collaborative relationship starts when you become a friend of a friend.
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This episode’s guest is David Burkus, the author of Friend of a Friend, and he tells us about our hidden networks. If you’re not familiar with the term of what a weak tie is or a dormant tie is in your network, he’s going to explain what that means so you no longer have to push yourself out in these networking situations handing out business cards to strangers and hoping that suddenly works. He’s got a whole different way of doing it. David is all about figuring out what your social capital is so that your network can become your net worth. He said when you tap into this hidden network, you’re doing it in a structured way that’s been proven scientifically so that you can become a super connector and realize that what you have to offer other people is what makes them want to know, like, trust, and keep you in their network.
Listen To The Episode Here
Build A Big Network By Becoming A Friend Of A Friend with David Burkus
Our guest is David Burkus. He’s a bestselling author, a sought-after speaker, and business school professor. In 2017, he was named one of the world’s top business thought leaders by Thinkers50. His new book coming out, Friend of a Friend, offers readers a new perspective on how to grow their networks and build key connections, one that’s based on the science of human behavior, not just rote networking advice. He’s the author of Under New Management and The Myths of Creativity. He’s a contributor to Harvard Business Review. His work has been featured in everything from Fast Company to Inc. Magazine and CBS This Morning. David’s innovative views on leadership has earned him invitations to speak to leaders from organizations in the Fortune 500 like Microsoft, Google and the US Naval Academy. His TED Talk has been viewed over 1.8 million times. When he’s not speaking or writing, David’s in the classroom. He’s the associate professor of leadership and innovation at Oral Roberts University. He was named one of the nation’s Top 40 Under 40 Professors Who Inspire.
David, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me. You’ve outed me as under 40. Thanks for saying you’d love to have me as a teacher.
When I was that young, and I’m not anymore, someone said to me, “It’s a handicap you’ll soon outgrow.”
I have been excited about being an up and comer.
In Hollywood, everybody wants the young people.
The only problem is I have to actually arrive. The problem with being an up and comer is you got to actually arrive, otherwise you are forgotten. The pressure is on.
Friend Of A Friend: The problem with being an up and comer is you’ve got to actually arrive, otherwise you are forgotten.
Not today. That’s a lot to accomplish at any age, let alone under 40. What inspired you to say, “This is what I want to do with my life.” You could take us as far back as you want, your old story of origin.
I went to undergraduate university as an English major. I want to be a writer. I want to be like Ernest Hemingway but with a lot longer life expectancy. When you are nineteen years old, the big dilemma if you want to be a writer is, “I’m going to write fiction,” because that’s the only thing I am aware of because I’m nineteen years old. “Am I going to be Ernest Hemingway? Virender Kapoor? Am I going to be James Patterson?” You have no idea of all the other genres out there. While I was at university, I also learned one other thing, which is the fact that most of the faculty that were teaching were pretty poor. They weren’t exactly successful writers, otherwise they wouldn’t be teaching in university. Some of them has some decent success, but they were all going that track of trying to be literary genius, which doesn’t pay well.
I found a paperback copy of Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, which is my least favorite of all of his books now. This is ironic, but what was amazing about it to me as someone studying writing and storytelling was how good he could tell a story about something that was true. This whole idea of narrative non-fiction had never occurred to me. What he was telling was also useful because it was steeped in science and good ideas. That was one where I’m like, “This is fun. Where do I learn more about this?” I started reading a lot of the other folks that were arriving at the time, Daniel Pink, Chip and Dan Heath, and those kinds of books, and left university thinking, “This is what I’m going to write, non-fiction steeped in social science with a story-telling bend,” because that’s what I learned how to do these last four years.
I also need to eat, so I worked in the pharmaceutical industry for six years as I went to graduate school part time. Eventually, I graduated that and made a big leap. I was an accidental professor. At no point in time have I planned on doing that. What happened was the affordable care was signed. One thing is for certain, it is going to change just about every industry that are butted up against healthcare. I started thinking, “Maybe I should look for a lifeboat now while no one is looking.” I jumped ship and I started collecting some adjunct courses. Eventually, that turned into, “We like you. Would you like to apply to this full time position that’s open?” I did, and it has been a phenomenal job to have while focusing in on being a writer and speaker. They have done a good job of not caring that I write in the academic journals and publishing tier one stuff that gets read by fifteen people but gets you tenure. I work for a small university. They love any attention that we bring them.
I figured out in grad school easily that I am a way better storyteller than I am a researcher. I’m terrible at doing it, I find it boring, but I love talking about other people. That has become the unifying thing in everything that I do. I’m trying to get good ideas out of the ivory tower and into the corner office or the co-working space or the coffee shop, wherever work gets done, trying to get those ideas that are complicated, put handles on them so people can start using them as a tool.
Friend of a Friend . . .: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career
I love it. That line you said, “Look for a lifeboat while no one’s watching,” is a great tweet because that concept of anticipating disruption before it hits is what allows people to stay ahead. Let’s talk about your book, Friend of a Friend. The subtitle is Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career. What’s a hidden network?
When we use term hidden network, we are referring to different elements from network science. For most people, when they hear the word networking, they’re thinking one of two things. They’re thinking of that cocktail people full of strangers where they stood in the corner of the room and talk awkward the whole time, or they think about those people who are just focused on running up the count, collecting as many business cards as possible or as many LinkedIn connections. We took for this book a different approach, which is that you don’t have a network, you can’t grow a network, you exist inside of a network. The best networkers are the people that figure that out and respond accordingly.
Your hidden network specifically refers to things that get overlooked if you are in that first faulty mental model of trying to run up the count. It’s made out of things like your weak and your dormant ties. A lot of folks are familiar with some of the early research on weak ties. Dormant ties, in particular, which are a form of stronger connections that fell by the wayside, are incredibly powerful and incredibly useful. It’s also referring to who is at the fringes of the network and who is one introduction away from you. A lot of people wait until they need something and they start begging for specific introductions. There are better ways to develop an awareness of who’s just one introduction away from you so that when you do need it, you are there but you are in touch with the people who are going to be those pathways often enough that it’s not an awkward ask. The rest that is hidden is less about the network structure itself and more about the phenomenon of networks and the things that happen in every network, whether it be people, electrical grids, computer systems, and food chain ecosystems. There are a bunch of different principles from network science that are universally true that people start to understand how to have a way better map of their map and figure out how to respond accordingly.
Let’s double-click on each of these terms you gave us so that the people can say, “Now I understand what a weak tie is and what a dormant tie is.” We do encourage people, once they understand the concepts, to write out those people in those two categories.
You don’t need to write them out. You just need to pay better attention. I love that term double-click. A lot of people are familiar with the term “weak tie.” I’m not the first person to talk about it, but it’s misunderstood. A lot of people believe that a weak tie is your friend of a friend or is a person you don’t know but is one introduction away. It’s not a weak tie. Specifically, a week tie is someone you know but you don’t know that well. You know their name, their face, you are a little bit familiar with their background, but you never hung out together. You never had a long conversation. You don’t them know that well but they are still there.
Would that be like a Facebook friend that somebody asked them to friend you, but you’ve never met them?
[Tweet “Tap into your hidden network.”]
It could be. I actually reject all of those. You and I are both in a powerful Facebook group for speakers, and there are a lot of folks that you and I both know but we probably don’t “know” know. We haven’t hung out, we haven’t had dinner together, we haven’t seen each other in an event yet. We are a little familiar with their work but we are not super familiar with them. We just interact in those space. Some of them will become close-knit ties, but most of them will probably stay weak ties just because you can’t be best-friends with everybody. It doesn’t work. It’s simple linguistics. It wouldn’t be best then. That’s different from a dormant tie. A dormant tie is somebody who was a close connection at some point but for some reason they fell by the way side. Either you changed jobs or they changed jobs or they moved cities. Sometimes there are some reasons we make someone a dormant tie, but they’re somebody whose connection was stronger but they fell by the way side.
If you think about your community, if you think about the network that you are in as a three-dimensional object, the circles and lines that you can picture when I say the term “network,” your close connections are close to you three-dimensionally. Your weak and your dormant ties are far out in the network. But because they are far out in the network, they are close to other people, which means your weak and your dormant ties are usually a source of new information, new opportunities, new connections, and new referrals. They are usually a better source than your close-knit connections. Often, the people that we are closest to, we all think alike, act alike, sometimes look alike. We all have access to the same information, so it’s not as useful a lot of times as those weak and dormant ties.
I have an example of that happening to me a couple of years ago. It’s someone I went to college with many years ago. We lost touch, I moved from Illinois to LA, he moved from Illinois to DC. Then he was Googling for a speaker at his company and I came up in the search. Somehow, he found my content or looked me up, and then he just reached out. I hadn’t heard from him in years. He said, “We’re looking for a speaker to come and talk about how to help the architects tell better stories to get more clients. Would that be something you’d be interested in?” I was like, “Oh, my God.” Is that the dormant contact you’re talking about?
That’s exactly right. I had a similar experience happen one time. I was in pharma for six years and I used to see this rep who used to work for one company and he changed jobs, became a trainer, started working internally. He moved on to New Jersey where basically all the pharmaceutical company is based. The same thing happened. Fast forward five or six years, he’s looking for folks for their internal speaker series for the executives, and he’s like, “I know this guy.” He started reaching out and we had that whole connection. It happens often.
In the book, we talked about the craziest example I have ever heard, which is the UFC Mixed Martial Arts became the fastest-growing sport in America because Dana White and Lorenzo Ferttita were dormant ties. They went to high school together and Dana got kicked out. Fast forward ten years, they see each other at their high school friend’s wedding and they reconnect and start trading text messages and emails about prize fighting because they both love that sport. Dana is the one that is connected to the UFC’s original owners and finds out that they were losing money. He calls up Lorenzo and says, “I think the UFC is for sale and I think you should buy it.” Lorenzo just happens to be running around in the Nevada State Athletic Commission, hosting boxing events at his family’s casinos. You have this perfect mix of this guy who is running around the UFC community which is on the verge of getting banned, and then this other guy who’s running around in the sport regulatory agencies. They reconnect after ten years and come together, they purchased the UFC, they take it over, they get it regulated, they do the things you need to do to be a successful promotion, and two years ago they sold it for $4 billion. $4 billion is the same amount of money that Disney paid Lucas Film for the entire Star Wars franchise. This is a lot of money and it literally wouldn’t have happened if two guys didn’t reconnect at a high school friend’s wedding.
Friend Of A Friend: Your weak and dormant ties are usually a source of new information. They are usually a better source than your close-knit connections.
That is a great example of your network being your net worth, don’t you think?
Absolutely. In sociology, they use the term social capital to describe the value that’s in your network, both the value that’s created for a community, and also the value that you create for yourself when you start tending to the network and worrying about its internal connections and who is connected to you. There are a ton of research that shows that just simple lessons about how social capital works and how network works make executives more likely to get promoted, more likely to get raises, more likely to end up in leadership roles, just all of these incredible forms of value that happen when you stop paying attention to “who do I know?” and start paying attention to the whole network and the potential for value that’s there.
That leads right into one of your key takeaways from your talk about Friend of a Friend on your book is how do we foster authentic and collaborative relationships?
In terms of weak and dormant ties, you already have this. You can do something rudimentary, like you could make a list of people when you scroll through your phone and you realize you haven’t talked to them in a year and a half. If you have a Facebook account or a LinkedIn account, you probably feel like I do. You newsfeed is just overloaded with people that are like, “I met you at conference two years ago, and now I see every update you post on LinkedIn.” Those broadcasts are great opportunities to reach back out. To some extent, the social network companies know this. That’s why they do weird things like, “Congrats on your work anniversary.” If you ever had a work anniversary, you know there are so many people sending you those that you can’t keep track of it all.
What I tell people a lot of time you can do, just strolling through that newsfeed and you see something that connects, even if you haven’t talked to that person a long time, you can offer them something simple. Maybe it’s just a simple, “We’re moving from Illinois to Washington, DC.” Maybe it’s a simple, “This is the single best place in DC to get handmade pop tarts.” Don’t post it on LinkedIn. Send them an email or a text message or a phone call, something more intimate that depends on your relationship with them, and then follow up with a simple question. “Besides that, what else is new?” or, “Tell me more about your transition.” Use that little piece of information and that offer of something valuable as an opportunity to reengage that conversation. If you make this a regular habit with all of these weak ties, then they are there when you need them. It just seems like one other conversation.
[Tweet “What is your social capital?”]
Here’s my key takeaway, everybody, from what he just said. This is gold. You might want to write this down, highlight it, whatever you do to retain information because what David just said is worth so much in your social capital. Respond to people in a way that’s personal and relevant. Take the time to not just ignore or give thanks when someone says something as simple as, “Congrats on your work anniversary.” After you’ve given some content that has some value, follow that up with, “What else is new with you?” Take an interest in someone else. Is that a fairly good summary of what you said?
I love it. People do the exact opposite. They ignore people until they need something, and then they usually send that, “What’s new?” and then the four-paragraph thing about what they need. You know they don’t care about what’s new.
The big takeaway for me is building relationships before you need them, almost like what you did when you talked about, “I got to find a lifeboat before anybody knows I’m looking. Let’s not wait until there’s a crisis.”That’s the importance if you have a job to keep your network alive so that you’re not waiting until you’re laid off to go find a job.
That’s exactly right. My actual situation, what I did was I gave myself a year. I was in an all-company meeting the day after it was signed. It was signed on Sunday night, I was in an all-company meeting on Monday, but it wasn’t about that. It was already a planned meeting, we were all talking about, “This is what’s coming in the fall,” and how we were excited and how we are going to make all this money and I’m sitting there going, “No one is addressing what just happened and how things are going to change.” I wrote my resignation letter on my company laptop sitting in that meeting, me in a sea of a thousand employees supposed to be excited about whatever new drug they were talking about. I wrote my resignation letter, but I dated it for a year later. I came home, I print it out, and I told my wife about it. It was sitting at my desk at home a little less than a year.
I gave myself a year because I knew I need to start building relationships in this new area. Because I was in graduate school, I had a couple of connections. I picked that as the easiest transition for me, but I need to stop focusing on any relationships inside the pharmaceutical industry that’s not going to help me anymore. I need to start focusing on the relationship over here. It took nine, ten months of building out those relationships to get to the point where it happened. I didn’t run around begging people I just met for a job, I was just focused on, “I need to start creating these relationships so that this network is there when I ultimately do need it inside of a year.” I was prepared to quit inside of a year anyway, but I didn’t need it. It was ten and a half months when I signed the actual contract for the full time position.
One of the things that makes you so unique and what your keynotes and your books are about is you have this ability to combine insights about creativity with management skills and now hidden networks. I love that thread because once someone like me find someone like you, I want to read all of your books. You gave us an example of coming up with a creative new place to eat for someone who’s moved to a new town, but let’s double-click on your expertise on creativity. You have this other great book, The Myths of Creativity. How can people use creativity in their ability to build their network?
The big shift here on creativity is there needs to be a mental model shift. A network is not just growing the number of context that you have, it’s looking at the entire network. There is a mental model shift that needs to happen with creativity, too. The Myths of Creativity attacks this idea that only certain people are creative and other people aren’t. It attacks it on the linguistic level. There are terms that people who are trying to dismiss their own creativity use that people who are doing creative work from day to day do not. They’ll say things like, “It just came to me.” Where was it before? They use these terms. The book is about changing that terminology. First and foremost, the biggest terminology when it comes to networks and connecting is people always say this phrase like, “It’s all who you know.” That’s good news because it means that if it’s all who you know, then just go know people. Figure out who to know.
Friend Of A Friend: People ignore people until they need something.
When you look at the creative process, we tend to think it starts with brainstorming and coming up with great ideas. That’s the first fun moment, but when you look at design firms or even films, there’s a ton of research that goes in ahead of time. In my case, with looking at trying to make a job transition, the research part is the most overlooked part of getting creative. In a job transition, too, people will usually tap their closest circle and they will start blindly to respond to job postings on Monster.com instead of going, “I need to research, which means I need to map this network. I need to figure out who’s connected to who, who I’m connected to, who I’m on one degree of separation from.” Truthfully, it’s less about coming out with new and novel ideas and more about taking the time the way that someone at a design firm or someone who’s making a film or writing a book would do to research and to start understanding that network around you. Usually, the path appears.
All of that said, there are definitely some small tactical things you can do to get creative. I already mentioned one, which is ignore the built-in tools and start thinking about creative and unique ways you can reach out to someone. I love John Ruhlin who does a lot in gift-giving.
I have had him on.
He’s the most creative guy I have ever known in terms of figuring out how to give gifts and who to give. He even talks about the first thing you need to do is figure out who is in your inner circle, and you have to take care of your inner circle. They’ll appreciate that and see it as a gift. To me, it’s about doing this research to see the entirety of the problem, and that’s when the great insights happen.
His book, Giftology, along with your book, Friend of A Friend, would be the one-two combo punch that I would recommend people get because then you understand all the mistakes about horrible gifts like gift cards and when to give a gift especially around building your network. The thing that I hear from you is this concept of being aware of the importance of our network and then having some time dedicated to focusing on growing it and planning it as opposed to it just haphazardly happening.
That’s definitely true. Networks do not happen by accident. We tend to think they do and that’s why we throw up our hands and go, “It’s all who you know.” Yes, there is definitely nepotism, there are definitely people who are born into the right social circles. That happens. Especially in the west, especially in the United States, it’s much more likely that somebody got a great network from actually working.
In the book we talk about this term super connectors. It’s an overused term. Some people believe that it comes from the networking advice books. The truth is it is actually a network science term to describe the people who are usually in the gravitational center of the network and have the most connections. The thing that is most interesting about super connectors is not that they are connected to everybody, it’s that after a certain period of time, a principle called preferential attachment takes over. This is essentially when a new person joins a community, they are more likely to get introduced to the person who is most connected. They are going to give preferential nature to attaching with people that are already very well connected. I think about it more like a gravitational pull. Once you get a certain mass, the gravitational pull gets larger enough to pull other things to it and then that mass gets its center. There are two good news here. It’s kind of bad news. This is why people who seem like networking happens to them easily, you’re seeing them after ten years of work. The good news is that if you put in the work, eventually that gravitational mass starts accumulating and it does take over. It gets easier, but that’s not an excuse not to put in the work on the forefront.
[Tweet “Are you a super connector?”]
We’re back full circle to your book, The Tipping Point. I love connecting the dots.
Gladwell used the term super connectors in that. I think he uses super connectors, then he makes a brief reference to the terminology from network science. Most people actually say that it was Perozzi that invented it, but in network science, it referred to those people that are always connected to everyone with the assumption being that the most connected people are the reason that everybody is so interlaced. You heard the term “six degrees of separation.” The belief was that it’s the super connectors that are the reason that everybody is well-connected. The truth is that networks, by their very nature, are so resilient that everybody is connected anyways because people move. People move from Chicago to Southern California and as a result, they bring those connections with them. In that regard, in movie networks, the most famous super connector person is Kevin Bacon. We found out he’s the 669th most connected person in Hollywood, which is good news. You don’t need to be Kevin Bacon to have an incredibly useful network. Even if you are Kevin Bacon, you can still have an incredibly useful network that connects other people that you can get new connections from.
For myself, and I’d be curious to see if this becomes something you notice as well, it’s almost like a muscle. Creativity is a muscle. Making introductions becomes a muscle if you start orienting your brain to what value can I give? Who can I introduce that I know in my circle could help someone? I recently met a guy, Rich, who said, “I’ve got this company, RichNuts. I’m growing nuts from sprouts. It’s all very healthy and they taste better and the nutrition’s better. I used to be a fireman and I use that to get through my long shifts and now I got this company.” I said, “That’s a fascinating product. Do you know Eric, the Founder of Tender Greens which is a restaurant that’s here in California in New York that serves healthy food?” He goes, “No.” I said, “Let me see if I can make an introduction.”
I reached out to Eric at Tender Greens to say, “Here’s Rich’s story. Here’s his website. This is the person you would like an introduction to because you have the same philosophy of the quality of food and all this other stuff.” I got his permission first and he just wrote back one word, “Absolutely.” I made the intro and I’m thinking in my head, “What if Rich Nuts suddenly became what they put on the salads at Tender Greens. How cool would that be?” That gave me a charge. I get nothing out of it except introducing two people that are both into health food that are trying to make the world healthier. That stuff just lights me up. Is that the creativity with a muscle? How can other people do something like that if they don’t automatically think like that?
It’s a habit. You develop the habit. Creativity is a habit of just knowing now’s the time to do research, now’s the time you need to have lots of ideas. Network is a habit. In Friend of a Friend, we interviewed Jordan Harbinger, a friend of mine and a fellow podcaster as well and a super connector, but he wasn’t always. He was a law school dropout. He didn’t technically graduate. He quit his first company that he went to work for as a lawyer. He runs a podcast. It’s the only thing he does. It’s the only thing he wants to do. There’s no other business venture there. Most people he meets, he can help, unless you could be a good guest on the show, he can help them. One of the things they have developed is that habit of whenever he’s meeting somebody, what’s he’s listening for is “Who is the person I already know that this person needs to get connected to? How can I offer this person value by letting them tap into someone else?” Then he introduces. Even when he has a smaller group of people that knew who Jordan was, he still was thinking, “When I meet someone new, how can I help them through an introduction?” Over time, it became a habit, and over time, his amount of influence and connect level and connections grew. Now he’s at the point where he can ask for an introduction to anyone because anyone who knows him know he’s someone who’s super generous with his own connections and his own ability to give an introduction.
Friend Of A Friend: Creativity is a habit of just knowing now’s the time to do research, now’s the time you need to have lots of ideas.
I love it. What would be the one thing that you would want people to know about your book, Friend of a Friend, that would make them say, “How have I survived without this book?”
Most people get turned off by the idea of networking. If there is a small group of people who love it, this book will help you. It wasn’t written for you. It was written for the people that have read the networking advice book, read the How to Win Friends & Influence People. They are great books but they are someone else’s advice and experience. They’ve gone and tried to put that into practice, and then they felt sleazy and inauthentic, and no wonder because they are not being them in that moment. They are being someone else. They are wondering, “Why isn’t this working? Why doesn’t this come easier?” I don’t think you need another book and advice. What most people need is to understand what is universally true about networks. Once you learn how the network that’s around you is already operating, you can figure out your own advice. You can figure out, “This is what I need to do because this is what I’m neglecting.” The biggest takeaway is if you’re ever trying to give the perfect elevator pitch and you feel so inauthentic, stop and go learn how networks work. Then you’ll figure out how to work it properly.
It’s funny because I worked with people all the time on how to have a good elevator pitch.
It’s a different thing though. You even will probably tell people, “You’re not going to run into the pitch for your whole venture.” You are going to work your network to get the introduction to go meet with a venture on the list, and then you get into the pitch. There is definitely a place and a time for it, but it’s not a cocktail party.
I often tell people when someone says to you, “What do you do?”it is not an invitation for a ten-minute monologue. David, I can’t thank you enough for sharing your insights not only on how we can be a friend of a friend, but also how we can take our creativity into building our network so that we have more authentic and collaborative relationships with the people we work with and the people that we don’t know yet but our friends know. It’s been valuable. If there’s any last little takeaway you want to leave us with, obviously we’re going to follow you on social media, which is just your name @DavidBurkus.
To find the link to my book, go over John’s show notes. I am on a lot of podcast. I’m a podcaster and I am jealous of his show notes. You’re going to find a lot of value just in that, so please go over to that, especially for this episode. Go see them. They are fantastic.
Thanks, David. We are going to not let this weak tie stay weak.
I love it.
Thanks.
Links Mentioned:
- David Burkus
- Friend of a Friend
- Under New Management
- The Myths of Creativity
- David’s TED Talk
- The Tipping Point
- The Myths of Creativity
- Monster.com
- John Ruhlin
- Giftology
- Jordan Harbinger
- How to Win Friends & Influence People
- @DavidBurkus – Twitter
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TESLOOP vs. Amtrack with Haydn Sonnad
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
The key to success is not about being perfect but having the confidence to pursue your vision in your market. Haydn Sonnad takes smart marketing to another level with TESLOOP and how he pitched this to Elon Musk. The first thing he knew was to not compete with Uber or Lyft. Rather, his company puts the customer first. To do this, Haydn becomes the customer first before giving out something to other people. Haydn explains how TESLOOP offers a cheaper way of traveling in the long haul from San Diego to Palm Springs.
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Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Haydn Sonnad, who is the Founder of TESLOOP, which allows you to be in a Tesla and go from Los Angeles to San Diego or Los Angeles to Palm Springs. It’s an amazing new way to get around in a long distance ride without having to fight traffic or take the train or plane. I took it myself and loved it. He’s only nineteen years old. He’s gotten his startup funded. He talks about how he puts himself literally in the mind or the seat of the customer, how he anticipates every potential thing they might want to have, and what he’s going to do in the future with a car that drives itself.
Listen To The Episode Here
TESLOOP vs. Amtrack with Haydn Sonnad
Our guest is Haydn Sonnad, who is the Founder of TESLOOP. I have personally experienced this incredible service from Angeles to San Diego in a Tesla. Think Uber meets the Concorde jet; that was my experience of it. Everything from a concierge that’s making sure you’re happy, to first class service from “Would you like a drink? Would you like a snack? Would you like a pillow? Would you like earphones? What music would you like to hear?” It was amazing. When I had the opportunity to hear him speak about how he came up with this idea and how it’s scaling and how he got funding, I wanted to have him as a guest on The Successful Pitch. Haydn, welcome to the show.
John, thanks.
Back in 2015, you told your dad that you wanted a Tesla, correct?
Yeah, I just found out what Teslas were in late 2013. Ever since I saw one in person for the first time, I was just fanatic about them.
What did your dad say to you that made you come up with the idea of TESLOOP?
For a decent amount of time, maybe a little over two years before I had the idea, my dad had also been relatively fanatic about Elon Musk and all of his companies he was creating. I’d always hear videos of Elon talking in the background my entire life, so I wasn’t naïve about Tesla. When I was exposed to the economics of Tesla, I just dug into them and how Elon was preaching how these cars had longevity and they were backed by unlimited mile eight-year warranties, it caught my interest because I’ve never enjoyed vehicle maintenance work, like working on cars. I thought it’d be cool if you didn’t have to work on a car as much and you could just drive it a lot. From there, I initially had the idea to just lease out one car because I wanted to get into it and just look at the cars and see how they work for me. I figured that the lease was about $2,000 a month, insurance would be about $1,000, so if I can make up $3,000 month by dragging people back and forth from LA to Vegas, I’d be able to pay for the car and then I’d be able to drive the car when it wasn’t being used. That seemed great to me, because it was a win-win. I wanted to drive these cars, but obviously I couldn’t just buy one.
The range for the Tesla when it’s fully charged is about 250 miles, correct?
Yeah, give or take. The battery has a degradation curve, so it does get a little worse over time. Our 300,000-mile Tesla is probably at 80% of its initial capacity.
How many miles is it from LA to Vegas? Do you have to stop?
Yeah. LA to Vegas was 280, and you do have to do one charging stop in Barstow, which made it not the best trip for us. We generally don’t want to be doing trips that require charging stops. It would just add time to the trip. If you’re already competing on time against airlines, you want everything to be in your favor.
Smart Marketing: If you’re already competing on time against airlines, you want everything to be in your favor.
Is that why you decided you’re going to pivot and go to different locations, like San Diego and Palm Springs?
Initially after the first two months, we wanted to switch into Southern California, but there’s an intensive permitting process for going intrastate, which is like departing in California and arriving in California. For about a year, we bypassed that by leaving California and going to Nevada. After all the permits and TCP got sorted out, we were able to do the intra-California routes, which is where we first launched Palm Springs. Palm springs for TESLOOP is a great route. It’s the perfect distance. You don’t have to do a charging stop on the way. It’s a very isolated community, so nobody living there has a better way of getting in and out, the trains are bad, planes are super expensive, and not too many people like to drive themselves, especially the elderly who cluster in Palm Springs. They want to get back to their family in LA, but they don’t want to have to drive for three hours in traffic. That’s just both tiring and frustrating.
When did you launch Palm Springs?
We launched Palm Springs I believe in June of 2016, but the month might be wrong.
You’ve just hit your year mark there. Where along the route did you get a co-founder?
I got co-founders about a month in. Originally I pitched the idea of getting that one car and driving people back and forth to Vegas to my dad because I wanted him to financially back the down payment on the car, and he was pretty skeptical about the idea. He was like, “You’re sixteen, you’re not a good driver, and the time to drive back and forth from LA and Vegas is a terrible safety hazard.” I was like, “It might be, but at the same time, autopilot is going to drive these people anyways in the next couple of years, so it doesn’t matter if I’m good at driving or not. It just matters how well Tesla can put together their autonomous capabilities.” He was like, “That makes sense, but I don’t know enough about it, so go ask Elon Musk.” I managed to finesse my way into the Tesla shareholders meeting.
Let’s paint the picture. You’re sixteen years old, using some of your connections because I’m imagining you’re not a stockholder of any size, and you somehow managed to get in there. Tell us that story a little bit because that’s phenomenal vision, chutzpah, confidence that many people at many ages don’t even think to do.
I can’t dig too deep into the details of how I got into the meeting. It wasn’t from having connections. Security at the event wasn’t too strong. It’s not too hard to make people believe you’re a shareholder, if you can provide documents that back up your story.
You get in and there’s a bunch of people that want to get his attention and ask a question. How did you get picked?
I looked at the videos. They just stopped doing the whole Q&A with Elon at the last shareholders meeting, but they’ve done like four or five before, so I had already seen what the setup was like and I noticed that the microphone stands were on either side of the aisle and towards the end of the pitch, they just said, “Get lined up behind the microphone and then you ask Elon your question.” He normally didn’t get to everyone, so the first man on each side got to ask their questions. I just got in and I sat the closest chair to the microphone, and the second they opened up for questions, I got the second question.
[Tweet “Let go of being perfect.”]
I love that you did some due diligence. That right there is such a great takeaway. It’s not about just due diligence on pitching an investor or pitching a client. It’s figuring out the lay of the land before you even walk in the room. Good for you. What was it like talking to Elon who you grew up with his voice in the background?
It was a little intimidating definitely, and I wanted to make sure I got my question down right. I did and I went up and stuttered a little bit, but that’s fine. I conveyed my point and then I got him to answer it well and he said “Within three years, autopilot is going to be able to drive someone from LA to New York 100%.” He said he estimated it by three years, but they’re on track to do it in three years or one year from now. I was like, “My plan will work.”
I love that you just said that I wasn’t perfect and I stumbled a little bit. That’s the key to success. You probably have already figured this out, but you don’t have to be perfect to be successful. The fact, is you’re probably going to be nervous, you can practice as much as you can, and even if you stumble, at least you still got your question in and got your affirmation going. Let’s talk about the name because it’s not Tesla, it’s TESLOOP. From what I’ve read, they didn’t say they had a problem with it, so you didn’t have any big lawsuit pending with people thinking it was a Tesla company?
Originally I came up with the name TESLOOP when I was brainstorming ideas with my dad and he said something like Viperloop and I was like, “That’s terrible. That just sounds weird.” I did like loop because it incorporates the Hyperloop, which isn’t going to be possible for at least a couple more years. It also works out because TESLOOP, we’re just creating loops in Tesla, the car, so it’s a very literal name. Even when I talked to Elon, I’m going to be creating a constant loop between LA and Las Vegas and I’ll call it TESLOOP. He chuckled at that, he thought it was funny. About six months after we had started service, we got an email from Tesla. It was some lower-end corporate guy and he was like, “We’d like for you to change the name because we think it’s a little close and there may be a copyright issue.” We were like, “Of course, we had some backup names. There was no problem with that.” We of course liked the name TESLOOP the most, but if there’s any problem with Tesla, we didn’t want to go forward on that because we’re based on their platform and we want to be as friendly with them as possible. We responded and we’re like, “If you could have someone from the actual corporate come and let us know and tell us what exactly the problem is, we’ll change it.” They never responded back to that, so we’ve had the name for over two years now. They haven’t had a problem, and it’s trademarked under a different industry category than Tesla, so we got through in the trademarking process.
The other thing I love about what you’re doing is that you’re not competing with Uber and Lyft. This is not for short, little, long distance. This is for the long haul, San Diego, two to three-hour Palm springs-LA, and that market is not being tapped because that would cost way more than what you’re charging around $49 or so depending on where you sit if you were to take an Uber there and it wouldn’t be nearly as comfortable. That is smart marketing. Can you tell us the story of how far in were you? How much proof of concept did you have before you reached out to investors?
Let me just go back one step and talk about why we’re not competing with Uber and other intercity ride-sharing services. Fundamentally, they’re all based on the car won’t come on a platform, which is your internal combustion engine and you drive it yourself, an old car. I can almost bet that just don’t make sense in the future. There’re no other players in the regional mobility space that are on this platform, so we’re able to offer a way cheaper product than what you could do in an Uber. Uber from LA to Palm Springs is generally about $150, maybe $160 or $170, whereas the TESLOOP is about a third of that cost, if not less. I don’t think Uber is ever going to be competing in the long distance mobility space, just because they’re not on this car 2.0 platform and it doesn’t make sense for them. Eventually there are going to be competitors. There’re even competitors right now, but they are just planes, trains and buses, so they are again not economic competitors; they’re just in the same space as us.
Smart Marketing: It’s great when travels are rewarding and people are looking forward to it and they can see something to gain out of it.
When you look at the product required for regional versus in-city mobility, it’s a lot easier to get a fully automated in-city mobility product like the Tesla Network, which is going to be mobilizing all of the Model 3s to allow people to book them out on the months that you’re not using them. That’s going kill the inter-city space, and we don’t want to be competing at all with Tesla especially. When it’s in a long distance model, there’s a lot more human interaction, there’s a lot more routing that needs to get done, and there’s a lot more attention required to deliver a consistent experience. That’s very key to long distance, where if you’re going to be in the car for three or four hours, you don’t want to have that aspect of unpredictability like you find in Uber.
Let’s just take little reality check on that, especially if you’re taking senior citizens back and forth between LA and Palm Springs. I’m guessing that bathroom stops are a concern as opposed to train that might have a bathroom on it, but you’ve addressed that.
We definitely have always considered that and surprisingly it very infrequently comes up. Very little people ever request bathroom stops. When they do, we make it simple for them so you can either just tell your pilot, “I need to go to the bathroom. Can you pull over at the next exit?” If you don’t feel comfortable since it is in a ride-sharing scenario, you can just text your ground control operator and they’ll convey the message to the pilot, so you don’t have to expose yourself if you’re uncomfortable with that.
That’s forward thinking, that concept of putting yourself in the seat of the passenger’s mindset. That’s great.
We spent a lot of hours just driving around in the cars and testing out every single possible amenity. We’ve gone through twenty different travel pillows and all these headphones and we’ve tried to create the most consumer-friendly cabin as possible.
When I was hearing your talk, you said it’s the vibe of being in a Starbucks with Wi-Fi and all the amenities of free water and everything. It’s a great experience and it’s a great model and no one else is doing it. Do you ever worry that you could get competitors?
There’s definitely going to be competitors in the future once people understand that this model makes a lot more economic sense and it’s a lot cheaper for them to run mobility on it, but TESLOOP is relatively defensible. When you look at Starbucks, coffee is not a defensible industry. There’re so many coffee shops. It’s unprecedented for a coffee company to reach into the billion-dollar market caps. Starbucks did that by creating an experience. We’re creating an experience at TESLOOP that’s very consistent. It’s not going to be something that you’re unsure what you’re going into. Our routing is all done on proprietary software, so it’s very hard to replicate the exact routing we’re using. There are very different requirements when it’s electric autonomous cars as compared to gas cars, because there’s a lot more considerations to take into account. Also these cars can query so much telemetric data every quarter of a second, so there’s a lot more data processing. That helps you also get better estimations of everything related to the car. That’s hard to replicate, but that’s not impossible. If a company were to take $15 million and get a bunch of cars, they could do this. At scale, we could get better. The trips become shorter because we’re able to link people that are closer together at origin and both destination.
We’ll have more frequency, so it’ll become to a point where even though they are pre-scheduled trips, it’ll be on demand. If we’re having a trip leave every hour, that’s pretty close to on-demand. You never going to have to wait more than two hours until one car is full or something. When you’re doing this long distance, you also want frequency, because there’re a lot of different times that people are traveling for different reasons and you want to be able to satisfy everyone’s time. Also, we can make a more personalized experience through social engineering, which is linking similar people with each other in the car so we can get beneficial human interaction and get people talk to each other and have party cabins and whatnot. There’re a lot of possibilities for creating a very personable brand.
[Tweet “Have a conversation not a presentation when you pitch.”]
That’s where it is an exciting, unexpected treat. I had somebody in the car with me on the way to San Diego that we had a lot in common. We didn’t know each other, but he was fascinating and he found me interesting, so the kinds of people you meet doing this are great. One of my friends, Mark Lovett who lives in San Diego is the Founder of the TEDx down there, and when I told him that’s how I arrived, he got jazzed because one of their goals is getting as many people in LA as possible to come to San Diego to the TEDx events. Imagine getting several cars of yours taking people down to San Diego at different times that everyone in the car would be going to a TEDx anyway and you start this interesting conversations before you even arrive or on the way back talking about the talks you heard. It’s an incredible opportunity.
It’s great when travels are rewarding and people are looking forward to it and they can see something to gain out of it instead of just losing their time and money and motivation to move.
Who knows what connections you would be making there? I was also fascinated that you call the driver a pilot. I believe there’s a two-day training. Can you talk about that?
The training is more intensive than what you’d find in Uber. We train them to be a brand ambassador. We train them how to handle the in-cabin experience, so how to regulate that everyone’s happy. They have to learn how to operate the cars, because driving a Tesla is different than driving a normal car. There’s autopilot you need to deal with, and there are no gears. It’s very different, so we give them at least five hours on-the-road training experience then they do a practice loop where there’s a TESLOOP employee, and then they do one solo loop where they’re heavily monitored. If they pass and we like them and they’re friendly, they become pilots. The pool of people we choose our pilots from is also what adds to TESLOOP. Instead of just having professional drivers that have come to a point in their life where they’re strictly professional drivers and they have less outside experiences to talk about, that can be boring. If you’re bringing in young actors and people that are just full of life and enthusiasm and like talking to others, it can help some people feel more comfortable in the car and just having a rewarding time.
The other thing that’s coming down the road, no pun intended, is the concept that eventually a passenger could be the pilot in exchange for not having to pay for the ride. How would that work? Would you have to train the passenger?
The passenger program could be one of the most revolutionary thing that’s happened to travel that’s tapping into consumer mobility. The way it’s going work is after you are a passenger on TESLOOP and you’ve taken it maybe once or twice. We haven’t finalized the details on this. You’ll be able to apply to a position called the passenger pilots where on any of our routes, you can book the driver’s seat for free in exchange for being a conductor of the trip. Yes, there’s going to be a little bit of training for them. They’re still going to have to do a couple hours, but by that point, once we launched this, autopilot is going to be driving the car safer than any human can drive the car. The actual driving task is going to be very mitigated through autonomous capabilities and it’s not going to be something that’s dangerous to give out to people that aren’t very experienced drivers. We are going to feel very comfortable that we’re able to do this very safely and efficiently. The insurance companies have given us the okay on this. We’ve already done a couple of tests on our Vegas route, but we haven’t pushed that forward just yet. We still want to create the most consistent experience as possible for now and it becomes a little less consistent when you have uncontracted pilots.
Smart Marketing: The people we invest in are the ones that are human and are authentic.
Take us back to what your experience was pitching to get funded.
We’ve done a lot of different fundraising angles. We have had more than one person involved. There’s been me, my dad, the other two co-founders, Jared and Brian, we’ve all pitched in and tried to help get money for the company. That’s of course an important thing to do for any startup. I’ll just go through one. The very first one I ever did was up in the Bay Area. I forgot the name of the firm, but I went in and it was hard to say anything other than intimidating. It was scary. They were the most institutional investor stereotypes. They were just guys in suits with notebooks all sitting across from me on a table. You can prepare your deck and you can get all your talking points together. Every time once you get into a meeting, the conversation will organically drift into something else and you have to have all these answers that you need to figure out. There’ll be raising questions you haven’t even thought about. It can be scary to think that you’re answering a question in a way they don’t want to hear and that could result in them not giving you money which could in turn be very detrimental to the company. There’s definitely a lot of pressure in situations like that, but at the end of the day, I always go back into the conversational tone and just try to explain it to them as if they were my friend. I don’t try to bring in all these terms. It’s just as simple as possible and go into the fundamental values of TESLOOP and why this makes sense in the future and why it’s a good investment for them now.
That’s so smart. If all the investors I’ve interviewed on my podcast tell me, “The people we invest in are the ones that are human and are authentic,” and as you said, having a conversation like you’re a friend, because it is a relationship that you’re building. It’s not just “Here’s the money, bye.” They typically want to be involved and on your board and there are certain milestones they want you to hit and you have to be transparent if you’re hitting a bump in the road, again another pun. They’re investing in you even more than the idea. I can see why someone said yes to you. What are your next steps? Do you have big milestones? Did you raise enough money to last you twelve months or longer?
I’d say we have about until early next year enough money to run until then in the bank, but we’re going to start raising a real Series A probably end of September or early October. We want to get a lot of money so we can horizontally scale out these operations to a lot of different cities and find what markets work best for us and then further scale in there.
Do you plan to do LA or San Francisco to New York, that kind of venture? Are you’re going to stay within this 200-mile sweet spot?
The sweet spot is the 50 to 250-mile routes. The sweet spot is going to get a little bit longer as car batteries get better and supercharging speeds get quicker. I don’t think ever it will make sense to go from LA to New York. That’s 2,000 miles. That’s way too far. The plane is always going to beat you in that scenario, unless there’s some Hyperloop that does it better. We’re sticking to that electric car loop and hold that range. There’s a ton of markets that play into that. We can go to Texas and there’s the Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio area. There’re places all over Florida and Seattle, Portland. There’re a lot of routes. Even with 2% of the market share of people commuting between the cities, we can fill hundreds of cars. It won’t be too hard for us to get a decent amount of cars out there and a decent amount of markets.
What piece of advice you have for our audience on getting a startup to become a reality? Getting it funded and scaling it?
What we focus on always at TESLOOP is put the customer first. That’s cliché and everyone tries to say that, but you have to become the customer before you can give out something to other people. You have to take a second to try out your product and anything that you don’t like about it, there’s going to be someone else who doesn’t like that. Even if it’s most insignificant, like you think the travel pillow should be rectangular instead of horseshoe-shaped, you have to make sure that you’re confident in that and that’s how you would like this product to be.
[Tweet “Become the customer to anticipate their needs.”]
That’s great. Become the customer is a great mindset and a great way to watch what you’re doing. This is going to be successful because I’m a customer and I’m a fan and I’m telling all my friends. I even did a Facebook Live about it and it got a ton of views. It’s exciting. As you said, no one gets off a plane at United Airlines and says, “I just had the best flight ever.” There’s a real buzz about what you’re doing and I couldn’t be happier to be on the sidelines cheering you on. Thanks for sharing your insights and your passion for what you’re doing and making a difference on the carbon footprint and giving us all a better way to get around.
For the audience, email [email protected] and you’ll get a free first ride to try out TESLOOP on any of our routes.
That’s very generous of you, Haydn. Thank you so much.
If you want John’s free PFD of the three mistakes to avoid when you pitch, go to JohnLivesay.com and enter your email. Remember people have to trust, like and know you before they say yes.
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John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
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