Extending human life, with Humanity Co-Founder and CEO Pete Ward

0:05I remember when we met Astro Teller and he literally said to us almost like tongue in cheek we're wasting our time but also here's a bit of advice if you can crack behavior change then you have the holy grail of hell we tried to do it at google and we couldn't do it and so we made a point of going great that's really helpful we're going to crack behavior change

0:29meet pete ward co-founder and ceo of humanity now we've had some big thinking guests on the show but this time i'm speaking to someone who's trying to change the very nature of what it is to be human. Pete's company, Humanity, is on a mission to give people life. By embracing technology that's readily available to everyone, they say they found a way to slow down or even reverse the aging process. Pete's story is motivating. His experience of building success and failure has led to loads of useful insights which we're going to dive into today. Now, full disclosure, as I mentioned later in this episode, I am actually an investor in Humanity, but this is not sponsored content.

1:08I just think Pete is the kind of guy we can all learn from. Pete's been an entrepreneur for a while. Among other things, he was also the co-founder and CEO of Wayne.com, the larger social travel network for over 13 years. He sold it to lastminute.com in 2016. Something that's been very important for Pete throughout his life and career has been mentorship, which goes all the way back to childhood. If I were to chart it back, and everyone has a similar sort of inflection, I think I think my earliest mentor was was interestingly a teacher and and he just really mentored us in terms of like being able to you know believe in ourselves and do good things and so he helped us set up a tuck shop stroke video club which was I think illegal because we were showing recorded videos from the blockbusters of the time and and then charging kids to come into the classroom and then making money on the fun size Mars and Snickers or marathons as they probably were called at the time.

2:08And we did that on the basis that as long as we put the money back into the school, and actually we did that, we raised money for the first real computer, you know, not the kind of acorn computers that, you know, you can play Chuckie Egg on. And that was a really interesting experience because it just made me realize that, you know, you can just put a little bit of effort in and you can create something out of nothing. So fast forward to at uni, the first thing I did was set up the first entrepreneurship society at the university. And then through that, I actually received a fellowship to do entrepreneurship summer school at Cambridge University Judge School of Business.

2:39And that was great because it really made me feel like, oh, wow, this, you know, this is actually already starting to have an effect in that I'm starting to meet these really incredible entrepreneurs, seeing the future of technology and innovation. And so I kind of got, you know, drinking the Kool-Aid, I started to get a little bit addicted to this idea of learning entrepreneurship in and of itself. And so that carried forward to me doing entrepreneurship summer school at Sloan School of Business, MIT, which I got a fellowship for, and also London Business School, which I also got a fellowship in association with MIT.

3:11And I got Accenture to essentially part fund that for me as well, which was the graduate trainee job that I took after university. And so really what happened then is I took a year out traveling on my own, which of course is never on your own, and had a graduate trainee position waiting for me when I got back. And it was interesting because that was right at the time of the dot-com bubble bursting. And so a lot of people who were in my cohort, their jobs suddenly fell away. Thankfully, Accenture didn't cancel ours because I was already building up a huge debt pile. I think I was about£35 ,000 in debt by the time I got back from traveling.

3:46But I was a change person. And in that whole life experience of traveling, I saw my first idea, which was this travel social network because in those days people and this is literally showing my age down in those days people would say you know i'm scruffy beggars at yahoo.com you know let's keep in touch and you have these like life-changing experiences like hanging out with these people for you know days or weeks where they you feel like you know them immediately after a few hours because you're so unencumbered and vulnerable and the next thing you know i'm like scruffy beggars i have no idea who that is as soon as i got back i was already raring to go to go, right, I'm going to set up this first business.

4:25And I set it up in my spare time whilst taking my graduate job with Accenture. Totally. I mean, I do, I reflect on this a lot, but you're always basically just one idea or one person or one conversation away from having your entire life changed. Yeah, absolutely right. And I couldn't agree more based on my own life experience. And actually the things that probably have been most surprising in that sense is when you are less saying this is what I'm going to have happen rather you're open and present to the current situation and then somehow the this thing miraculously happens in front of you that takes you on that path and I think that actually happens a lot more than the very thing that I was seeking it's almost like the byproduct of just being open and present to you know what's in front of you 100 % you know if I think about how I started Heights I never wanted to start Heights it was never an inkling I never you've known me for years I never ever talked about this grand master plan to be in this category building this business or doing anything like this I just happen to have personal experiences and I lent into what I was learning from them and here I am so as long as you're open-minded and listening to what the universe is telling you yeah absolutely I think you have to show up and you know if you put yourself a little bit out of your comfort zone and just even if you don't fully know what to expect something will come from that and I definitely didn't go traveling with the intention of setting up a travel social network and i certainly didn't think right my next business is going to be a business focused on extending health span and longevity it was it was absolutely the opposite it was more that it came to me and i just immediately could see this is something that i really want to be part of and that and it so essentially it was a calling that then led me led me to lean in and say we should do this because i'm And, you know, I'm really excited by that idea.

6:11So listeners of a certain age might well know Wayne and might be really familiar because obviously it was a massive, massive global success back in the day pre Facebook. Right. So you were the original go viral business. So talk to us a little bit about for those that don't know what was Wayne and give us some of the highlights as well. Yeah. So we started Wayne. Where are you now? This is what it stands for. And in Arabic, it means where we didn't plan that. It was just what we were told. So we were quite big in the Middle East and that part of the world. But actually, it was two years of hard graft working weekends, evenings in London Business School, sort of seminar rooms, just trying to come up with this product.

6:50It was backed by the co-founder of Friends Reunited, Steve Pankhurst. And so he gave us the first, he actually gave us the first 10 ,000 and that was what we needed to get going. And we were super excited. It was right coinciding with my start, starting job with Accenture. So I was already sort of one foot out the door. And then we literally felt we had something that could be big, which was around this viral. And we asked Steve if he would lend us something really specific, like£27 ,000. And that's what he did. And we literally paid it back. And, you know, and then some because we reverse engineered viral marketing.

7:32It took us two years to get to 48 ,000 users. And then it took us literally a week to get 10 ,000 a day. So we went to a million in a matter of months. And actually, the real sort of hold on for dear life experience there was we didn't quite realize how fast viral growth can be when you're not expecting it. Because when we actually went viral, you know, this is back in the day where, you know, AWS cloud computing didn't exist. and it was that we had a we had a a good server ibm server in the data center that within a few days crashed and we were in the data center 4am calling up the the engineers to try and put it back live but they were saying well there's there's just no way we can this can handle that kind of level of traffic and we went we went from like zero to pretty much all of singapore being covered in a couple of days that's how fast it was going but we weren't making any money and this was way before we realized there was such a thing even though I did all these entrepreneurial summer school programs I didn't really think I need to raise money like venture capital money I was thinking how do we survive and how do we make money and so what we ended up doing which was probably one of the worst things I could have done at the time because I would have perhaps been a Mark Zuckerberg equivalent if I did something different but what we ended up deciding to do is let's turn the site off to every single country other than the UK and the US and make it chargeable via credit card because at least that way we know that the conversion to pay because in those days not many people were using credit cards to pay online it wasn't so secure and we went overnight from you know being you know not live to you know we're highly profitable and so within a year of that we we had you know six million users we we went to the venture catalysts and we we didn't need the money because we were profitable so it was a great place to be you know we were very much in control of our destiny.

9:25And we decided, and this was literally off the back of an envelope, okay, well, if we were to raise money, how much would we raise and why? And we said, well, a million quid each would be nice. So what's that in dollars? Well, at the moment, current exchange rate, that's like really two to one. So that's$2 million each. There's three co-founders. So that's 6 million. We should probably raise a bit more for the business too, because we could probably invest in some stuff. So let's round it up to 10. And then how much of the business do we want to give away? And we thought, well, you know, no more than 25%.

9:57Okay, great. So we know what we're willing to do an investment on. We say to any investor that we talk to, 10 million for less than 25%. And so we literally went to one of those dinners. It was a guy called Robert Locke, who used to organize these early sort of doors, network dinners for the tech entrepreneurs at the time. And we tried it on. We said exactly that line. And one of the investors around the table said okay i'm interested let's have a chat and within you know within a week we had a term sheet and we had other term sheets for less but we turned them down this one we we took and it was literally i think quite unique at the time because of that you know it was 11 we ended up doing 11 million dollars because we had quite a lot of interest from like real real impactful angels at the time including the likes of brent hoedman who became our chairman and we we took six million off the table.

10:45And at the age of 29, that was a pretty life-changing event where I had, you know, a few years earlier, been 35 grand in debt, you know, paid that off, you know, you know, by partly living at home with my parents, but I hadn't, you know, I was still living at home with my parents at the time where we just did this deal. So finally I can like buy a house and everything felt different because I had money in the bank and I could earn interest. That was in the days like now where you can earn interest. Fast forward to what happened next. So, you know, sitting high just raised 11 million dollars um you know we were a profitable business and one of the first things that the vcs and brent you know quite rightly i think said at the time if we wanted to be big because sites like myspace were coming out of the woodwork and people were hearing about this thing called facebook but it was private network at the time and they said we need to be free you know we need to stop charging a subscription and that way we can really grow uh even more you know our monthly uniques could go really high.

11:44And so we went literally overnight from being highly profitable to loss making. But that became the sort of the path that made sense, particularly when Sequoia were releasing reports at the time saying, you know, one unique is worth$30. So if you have like 8 million uniques, you're worth$240 million. And congratulations, your valuation has just gone up by$50 million month for month. This is what the advisors were telling us. so we're like thinking great we're on our path to a billion you know everything's going rosy doesn't matter that we're losing 100 000 then 200 000 a month in burn because you know we can follow that path and so fast forward to 2008 when we were you know going back to the market raising our next round we met with a fund that had just come to europe called highland capital partners and they um they gave us a term sheet you know the guy there you know fergal really nice guy in the actual uh it was a it was a polish restaurant in uh southwark called the baltic which is no longer there but it was a great place and literally on the back of a menu he wrote out the term sheet 20 million 60 million pre you know one time liquidation and he kind of gave me his word so we went down the process of doing dd they've already got back to us saying this is the best DD we've ever seen you know really like high quality it's pretty much a done deal.

13:07DD being due diligence not done deal for anyone that doesn't. Yeah not a yeah not done deal it certainly wasn't a done deal because you'll hear what happened next and this was a good a good learning in life no it's not a deal until it's a done deal because I actually went on holiday I had a obviously a booked holiday with my wife and my co-founder was going to kind of finish the the last little bits and bobs. And I get an email and a phone call from my co-founder saying the managing partner of the fund wants to have a call before finalizing the deal. I was like, OK, sure. I was in Playa del Carmen at the time.

13:43So I, you know, picked a time, booked in my spot in the internet cafe with my Skype headset on and literally had this call. And you know that moment when you just know this ain't going to happen. You know, the way they were asking the questions they were asking questions about churn and about things that were like the pain points of our business but it was very much like hmm yeah we don't think this is actually as good as we think it should be and so I left that call feeling like the emptiest of stomach and then within within a couple of days by the time I got to LA I got the news that they decided not to do the deal and I've never felt so broken as I did on that day because it just felt like the whole wind and life had come out of me because I figured, what are we going to do now?

14:28Every European fund had pretty much said, that's a good deal. You did well. We can't compete with that. And so we then went on a bit of a death spiral. We went from having this plan to grow internationally, international expansion, do all these great things with 20 million in the bank, to we're burning 200 grand a month in cash and we've got a million left in the bank. That's not going to last that long. So what did we do? We drew down on a convertible low note that was part of the previous deal, which we agreed with the investors, our investors at the time were Draper Esprit. And we essentially tried to turn the business around, but it wasn't working.

15:08We were literally starting to feel that without investing, we'd miss that window. And then one week after the deal falling through, the credit crunch, 2008 credit crunch hit. And suddenly all the market just disappeared. And that's why we, you know we had no choice but to draw down on the loan and and see if we can turn it around so then fast forward to the last literally six weeks or so of like when the conversion of that note is supposed to happen uh we get a we get a an email saying we need to discuss the loan note from our board member at the time and you know okay probably just a formality turns out that the investors didn't think the business was worth what it was when they invested and that they think that we should sell the business and we'll lose two thirds of the ownership and they'll drag us into a quick sale.

15:59And this was probably one of the biggest lessons in my entrepreneurial career because that really was the first time where the rug had been pulled from underneath me. And I felt very much betrayed at the time. And I think this is a bit of my own naivete if I'm completely honest, because whilst I didn't take it as badly as one of my co-founders, it did feel like a punch in the stomach and like a gun to my head. It would have been nicer for them to let us know six months earlier, look guys, if we don't achieve X by when, then we're going to have to do this because then I would have had a chance to do something about it.

16:36So if it wasn't for another great mentor of mine, a guy called Chris Grew from Oric, who a friend of mine at the time, Colvin Stone, who was another lawyer, said, you should talk to Chris. Because my existing lawyers at the time were saying, yeah, there's nothing you can do. You're screwed. You know, you're going to have to do this deal. And I was like, no, I don't like that. I don't like that advice. I'm going to get different advice. And I spoke with Chris and Chris was literally, well, there is one thing you can do, but you have to be willing to go all in. And I was like, I like the sound of that.

17:06What's that? He said, well, you have to be willing to go bust, but then you're playing their bluff. Because if you go bust or you say fine let's take the business into administration then they lose all of their investment pretty baller move and they're not going to like it but that is one way to get some leverage and I and we spoke about it with my co-founders and we're like no we're doing that and it was more out of principle that we did it because we felt that we didn't have the chance together as a team to sort of turn things around and so that's what we did and we it's the best lesson in life sometimes when your back is really against the wall because what we had negotiated as part of that in other words we actually did have a negotiation out of it was that if we can turn the business around in six months with some pretty hefty targets so the targets were we had to double the traffic we had to return to profitability and double the revenues in six months we trebled the traffic and we achieved the other two oh the other thing we had to do they made us do was to hire a COO.

18:12And so that was a bit of a surprise that you'll become apparent shortly, because we could collectively choose who that person would be. And I felt the right person, the number one person for me was this guy called Michael Gere, who I'd met over a coffee in Chancery Lane. There's this really nice American fellow who had just come over from Moscow. And he was telling me about what's about to be launched this this new dating site called Badoo and this was literally before it it went live and he's telling me about it and giving me a sense of how it's going to have all these like viral mechanics and social gaming aspects to it and I could just tell by the way he was talking that a he really knew his stuff and b this was actually going to be quite quite huge as we all know Badoo went on to become one of the world's if not largest dating site in the world Product Powers Bumble, sold to Blackstone for 3 billion.

19:03And he, at that time, had just helped Badoo get to about 70 million users, but he wasn't vested. So, you know, he was on the founding team, but he wasn't part of the ownership. So I was able to convince him to come on and join me because that was, you know, a great opportunity for us to work together. And so in that time, we focused on one thing. we did one product that was you know based on some of the experiences he had at badu called meet people with a travel angle to it and it worked and it was a great lesson to know if you focus on one thing you get the entire team to down tools forget what we were doing before the make or break opportunity and that turned the business around and we went on to live another day and then pass you know fast forward to a couple of years on we we ended up selling to lastminute.com where it all started i think the thing that struck me here with you um sharing this story is you didn't just accept that to be the truth.

19:58You could have taken it at gospel and you went to a pretty respected first person and second person and third person, etc. and heard the same thing, which wasn't what you wanted to hear over and over and over again. So you stayed curious. If you'd have stopped, if you'd have taken the first, second or third bit of advice that you were given and you weren't relentless about trying to seek a better way or a different potential answer, you wouldn't be in this position. You wouldn't have sold the business. You would have gone down instead of up. And I think that's really something in there, right?

20:29Because how do you ever know? Like, this is the problem with entrepreneurs. You know, we are stubborn, we are resourceful, and we are relentless. But how do you think you know sometimes if it's the right move or the wrong move, right? Because at the end of the day, you can keep banging your head against the wall for such a long time, getting the wrong answers be one right answer or one wrong answer away from the right one. But at the same time, you can also cause yourself quite a lot of anguish by doing this and not accepting fate for what it is. So how do you think you can possibly learn to get this right?

20:58Well, I mean, I think the first thing which I took from that whole experience that really stuck with me was, you know, the importance of never giving up and perseverance, because it got to the point where I felt I literally what's the worst thing that can happen. And I think we all fall into this, you know, fear factor of like, it's going to be my world is going to crumble if you know if the business goes under then my reputation is in tatters and i'm never going to get a job and then you kind of take a step moment you think well actually what will really happen you know i've got money in the bank i've had a huge amount of experience from what i'm doing you know i can do this again and and there there will be other opportunities so you don't actually have as much to lose as you think and the other big lesson which chris would really drill into me from auric would be that you have a lot more leverage than you realize.

21:44And it was when I started to believe in that and started to think, you know what, I'm going to test this theory out. I'm going to see just how much leverage we really have and to really push it to the point where, you know what, I am prepared to lose everything because that losing everything is actually not as much as, it doesn't scare me as much as I thought it did initially. And maybe what I'm standing to lose is not as much as what, you know, our investors at the time would stand to lose. So this is worth a gamble. and I think the other thing was to you know to sort of accompany that is that the amount of times we almost went bust you know both before and after that frankly for various reasons you know a few days from running out of cash or having to let go of most of my team and somehow not doing so and coming up with some rabbit out of a hat you know a few days before which I didn't even know it was almost like I had this and maybe this is almost unhealthy but I had this sort of feeling of like oh we'll find a way we always have we always will we're going to find a way and my staff would be in on this.

22:40They would know that they might not get paid in a few days. And then suddenly, miraculously, almost we would find a way. And that continued in those sensitive times to the point where, you know, we managed to sell the company, not for hundreds of millions, which is what I would have obviously liked to have done, but nonetheless in six figures with the team intact. And the moment that really hit me on that was I went to Poland where most of my team were to let them go because I was essentially mandated by my then investors at the time we had Scottish equity partners in who did a buyback recap when we turned the business around and I was sort of mandated to let them go because that's what we'd agreed you know in the board meeting and I literally sat there and I saw my team members start crying and it really hit me because I was like what are we doing this for what what is what is this what you know what is this all about and you know what I remember saying like no I'm not going to do this today I'm going to go back to the UK I'm not going to let anyone go I'm going to renegotiate with my investors and they they they actually gave us more funding you know credit to Scottish Equity Partners for that they they go okay that actually makes a lot of sense you know we've got some acquisitive interest we can sort of fund you because we were profitable but we were like on a very thin cash line and so that that made it harder but they were helping us if you know to to go through that time and and ended up almost selling to another company.

24:04And then even after that, when that kind of didn't happen because they had an existential event as a company, which is often what happens when you try to sell the company, you're just about to sell and then suddenly something left field happens and you're back to square one. But it was a blessing in disguise because I can't think of a better company to have sold to in the end, which other than last minute. How many times do you reckon you almost went bust? I counted at the time, and I can't verify this because it was based on then just working out those it was much closer to me at the time but I wanted to hit the number 15 because it was a really nice round number but I basically worked out it was 14 times.

24:40Blimey. I mean that is it's amazing actually I've never asked that question before and I wasn't expecting you to have such a high number let alone recollection of the specific number but that says a lot doesn't it says so much in someone's story to have gone almost bust so close like that 14 times and still have sold the company what is the key lesson that you want to share with entrepreneurs that are listening to that mean feat of resilience i mean first of all whatever when you're so close to the line you need to get advice insolvency advice and everything else you don't want to be done for wrongful trading so you know don't be naively thinking oh it's all good i can just like pretend everything is fine like make sure that you're always just on the right side of the line but at the same time be open and present to creative thinking in the very sort of you know when your back is against the wall because invariably things come out the woodwork that you don't expect that and it brings out the best in you and your team when that happens it's amazing how we get so you know we you know we let the team become you know inefficient you know we don't really focus on one thing we focus on too many things when we've got loads of money in the bank and no real time pressure but suddenly when you have no choice somehow you just become extraordinary in the way that you do things and so I think that whilst I wouldn't recommend anyone to get into that sort of struggle from month to month sometimes scenario I think when you find yourself there the number one thing is don't give up and just be open and present to opportunity and be creative in your thinking and usually invariably something comes up that gives you that second opportunity to keep going.

26:16I think it's really important to highlight something that you've said as well, which is staying the right side. Yes. Like it is super important that we, we don't act naively. Like I think you perfectly said it right. You're making sure that you're getting advice, making sure that you're not just hoping for the best. You are actually hoping for the best as a fucking responsible adult. You are still, you still have fiduciary duties. You still are a director of a company. Yeah. It's not a badge of honor. Well, it's not a badge of honour, but I think also, you know, people do go to jail for getting this stuff wrong, right?

26:51Exactly. I remember a time when I was going through something very similar in my last company, and I went to you, and you sent me to an insolvency lawyer. And I sat there in that insolvency lawyer's office. And I was like, honestly, so grateful that you told me to go there, because I was probably two weeks away from breaking the law, ultimately, without knowing. and we got out of it, but we got out of it on the right side of the law. And it's pretty important stuff. Yeah. And I think that's also about not being too proud or egocentric in this because a lot of people wouldn't want even people to know that they're talking to an insolvency practitioner because that surely sounds like you're failing.

27:27But it's just like seeing a therapist when you think something's not going quite right for your personal life or your family life. It's just very healthy, I think, to lean into that and just make sure that, you know you're doing everything you possibly can how do you feel to have almost built an enormous business and not to have i think it really became quite uh you know i never really confronted it until i saw the film social network because i watched that film and i in the cinema and i just couldn't help but thinking man that could have been us that was so close like i like chart the early stages and it's like you know if i didn't have if i had a sean parker like tap me on the shoulder and say, hey, let me introduce you to someone right now who can really help you like the next stage.

28:12And like, this is what you should do. Like, again, a mentor at the moment. I think maybe it would have been different. But, you know, the funny thing is I've had, you know, and I think the part of this is cognitive dissonance. But I think it's also genuinely being grateful for, in so many ways, my life experience today, because that I really cut my teeth on that experience. And if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have humbled myself, which I think a lot of entrepreneurs who've never had any form of failure because they've just been fortunate to go through to, you know, scaling and then exiting can get into a little bit of the mindset.

28:44Well, you know, you just have to be really smart and work hard and do this and then everything's just going to sort itself out. And the reality is not that, you know, that's the 1 % that you see in the headlines. And even those, frankly, will probably go through some struggles before, you know, they go there. Like how many of us do, you know, do you speak to who almost run out of money and then, you know, they just kept going and they found a way through. So I think that that sort of journey, the entrepreneur's journey, that struggle that we go through is a really humbling experience, which is hard to explain to anyone who hasn't done it before.

29:14You know, your listeners who are in the midst of it or about to go into it should be really aware of that. But again, it's the biggest growth opportunity for you personally to sort of learn what you're made of. Yeah. One of the things you shared as well, I just want to reflect on before we move off this topic and onto humanity is this. You have leverage. And I think those three words are maybe the most underappreciated, unrecognized realities of being certainly a funded business. When it comes to an investor-entrepreneur relationship, the understanding of who has leverage always feels one way.

29:57It always feels like the investors who have the board seat, who have the say, who you go to for advice, who have a lot more expertise than you, broadly speaking, because they speak to lots of different companies and use that against you. And they have a lot of very specific knowledge that you don't have because, and they use that to their advantage. All of this stuff just plays into a very one-way behavior cycle of you feeling like you need to perform for them what you did to call their bluff is actually fundamentally the one thing that i'm certain almost every entrepreneur could do but does not do and it's so important and i say this because i did this too i know the story of yours and i found it super inspiring and i also went as you know to a former guest and friend of ours michael acton smith of calm and i got his story And I got his, when this happened to me at Grable in my last company before Heights, and I needed to know how to turn the situation that I was in around, I went to Michael and understood how he got leverage and how he understood that actually every founder with investors in their business has leverage and how to hold your own and make sure you're calling a bluff and saying, if that's how it is, I'm going to just run it into the ground or I'm just going to, this doesn't have to be torpedoing a business.

31:18But in these times where the whole economy is tanking and businesses are going to be in trouble, it's worth remembering that. Yes. And I'm glad you mentioned Michael Acton-Smith because he's, to me, the archetypal example of someone who has been through some of those tough times, has maintained a real air of humility and niceness as a person, as a human being. you know i couldn't be more delighted about what he's done and you know it makes sense given he's also gone on his own journey with with calm and beyond totally so perfect example because and i suppose this is disclaimer michael and i are both investors in humanity yep so which is your new business so i'd love you to talk to us a little bit about what humanity is and why you wanted to start that and like frankly why you wanted to go at it again after a journey like that you know almost going bust 14 times, finally making money out of it.

32:14You know, what the fuck's the point? Why don't you just retire and chill out? Well, it all started, as a lot of these things do, at Web Summit. Funnily enough, when it was in Dublin, I was having a pint of Guinness with my good friend Michael Gere, who had helped get me out of the mess that I was in with Wayne. We were both wearing coloured ponytail plaits in our hair. No idea why, but the photo says it, so it's true. he literally said to me and i remember it really vividly because it's not the sort of thing that most people say to you what if i told you we could end aging and i literally looked at him i said okay and i say i'd tell you i think you've had a few too many pints of guinness yeah and also that i imagine i imagine that more pints of guinness is not the answer to end asia no it might they might like to say they have a lot of iron in there but that's a very fractional and actually too much iron is not a good thing but that's another story but no it was very much that sort of moment in life that we were talking about earlier, which comes to you and you, I was taken by surprise, but very intrigued.