Dr. Hyman Interviews Andrew Horn about Tribute.co

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome. We are here today with a good friend of mine, Andrew Horne, who is the founder of a company called Tribute. You probably never heard of it, but you will, I promise you, because it is a game changer and it changed me in a big way. Because I last year had this birthday, which I have usually everywhere with my friends. And, you know, often, you know, people write you nice little thank you cards or a birthday card or some little note or it's sweet, it's good. But Andrew gave me a gift which was essentially a video that he put together through his company Tribute that had all my friends, all my family, had these short little vignettes of what I meant to them, what I was for them, how they felt about me, what they loved about me. And it was the most moving, touching, beautiful gift I had ever received.

All right, Mark Hyman, Dr. Mark Hyman.

Here's what I love about Mark Hyman.

There are so many things that I love and admire about you. First of all, you are an amazing dad. I just spent the whole day with you.

My life has been impacted by you.

In so many ways.

I think Mark is the man on the mission.

He's changing the world through functional medicine and preventative medicine.

You are an amazing friend to me.

And so grateful for your support and.

We are in this for the rest.

Of our lives together.

You make everyone around you lit up all the time. You carry yourself with so much love for the world.

He's also just been kind of the.

Most respectful father I could ask for.

I want to thank you for getting me well, for getting me to care about my body in a different way. in a better way. And thank you for your brotherhood, your friendship. I feel like I have the brother I never had and I really treasure you, value you. You have literally changed my life by.

Teaching me about functional medicine.

Number of lives you've changed is just magical to watch and to be part of it.

That, my friend, is why I think you are awesome.

Happy Solar Return, billions of miles you.

Have traveled and billions more to go.

Happy, happy birthday. You mean the world to me. And... Love you, Mark. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Bye, brother.

You know, you can receive fancy things. You can get a new car. Someone can buy you a house. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's the things that are personal that matter. It's those gifts that really speak to you. and what matters to you. And it was such a beautiful moment and it sort of woke me up to the power of how we can move each other by telling stories about each other. Why should you wait till you're dead for people to say nice things about you, right? So you founded Tribute and you created this opportunity for people to create these extraordinary gifts. You know, we're coming up on the holidays, Christmas, people are wondering, what should I give somebody? You can accept somebody a gift like this. It's something that they will never forget and they'll have forever. So how did you end up founding Tribute and what is it all about anyway?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's incredible to hear that and that's exactly why we created Tribute is because I wanted to share a very personal experience that I had on my 27th birthday. And that was walking into my apartment here in Brooklyn, New York and my girlfriend, Miki, who Mark you know as well. decided to throw a surprise party for me. And so when I walk through the door, I see 20 pairs of shoes I'd never seen, and all my friends jump out and give me this massive hug. And then halfway through that party, she yells, she says, Everyone in the living room, and everyone jumps in, and she puts this picture up on this projection screen. And what I found out is that she had reached out to 20 of those friends, and she asked each of them to submit a one-minute video telling.

Me why they love me. And then she put those all in.

One montage, and she puts it up on the screen.

I got chills just listen to that story.

I get chills every time I relive it. And so I'm sitting in the back of the room, no idea what's going on. And then, you know, the first thing on the wall is my mom telling me how much she loves me. It's my dad telling me how proud of me he is. It's my best friend in New York calling me his best friend for the first time in our friendship. And it was like 60 seconds in and I had this urge to cry. And my first inclination was like, hold it back. And then I was just with all my friends and I just let it rip. And then I just started crying for the next 20 minutes. I just sat there and then it ended. All my friends came up, we hugged, and then the first thought I had was, you just mentioned it, that I just watched my eulogy at 27. And what a better time to actually receive that than lying in a casket. So I walked in the next room and I asked Miki, how'd you do this? And she looks back and she doesn't hesitate and she just says, well, it sucked. I was like, what do you mean? It took her 15 hours. It's hundreds of emails. collecting files through Dropbox and Drive and text message. And it was in that moment that I was just like, wow, this is the most powerful gift on Earth. And the only reason more people don't receive it is just because it's difficult to create. And so then and there tribute was born. We just wanted to share this experience with as many people around the globe as possible.

And, you know, so how many people now have gotten these tributes?

So we're at 30,000 tributes in more than 30 countries around the globe. And you've got the New Yorker calling it Hallmark 2.0. And amazing people like you creating it and obviously you helped us to now spark some of these partnerships with folks like the Cleveland Clinic and Northwell and you're actually partnering with these hospitals to get tribute to patients who are either going into or coming out of major operations to help them connect their community in a powerful way. It's true.

I mean there really is a biology of love, right? There really is a biology of love. What happens to you physiologically, to your immune system, to your hormones, to your to your brain chemistry. It's actually a real thing. And it's kind of hard to manufacture that or just create it. But you've sort of come upon this amazing technology that allows you to easily offer this to people through like a simple website and like boom, you can share this. And that's really why I invited you to come to Cleveland Clinic. I invited Andrew to come to Cleveland Clinic to have a moment to speak to over over 3,000 representatives from hospitals from around the country at the Patient Experience Summit last May because I thought, God, wouldn't this be an amazing thing in hospitals when people are suffering and alone and lonely and isolated and scared to have this gift, not just a bunch of flowers in their room from a bunch of people, but something really powerful and meaningful. And it just has so much potential to really change people and improve people's quality of experience in hospitals and when they're sick. and really for everybody. I mean, I wish this gift on everybody. Like if I could think of a gift to give everybody, it would be this gift because, you know, nothing compares to it, nothing.

We call it the most meaningful gift on earth for a reason. And, you know, it was a powerful transformation in the way we were running the company was honestly that moment a year ago when we had been giving these all over the world and then we really started to partner with a number of hospitals. And so we started to ask ourselves, okay, we know this is a powerful thing, but we haven't actually quantified why. And so we started looking into what is the research on gratitude? What is the research on human relationships and social ties? And actually how that impacts the body because we couldn't go in front of a thousand doctors and say, this is a really great thing that's going to make your patients feel good. We wanted to actually be able to quantify like here's the impact that they're actually going to see. And I mean the first thing that we started looking at is again, it's like the power of strong social ties, you know, on the body. And like we look at, you know, Dr. Waldinger's research from Harvard. They did the 75-year longitudinal study of 750 people and happiness. and the first thing they say in the report is plain and simple. The most glaring thing we take away from this research is that great relationships keep us happy and healthy and he just repeated in the study. It was the number one thing that we can do. And again, I have some of the stuff here, but fewer cardiovascular disorders for people who have more than one good friend and positive mental attitude. It's a social tie. So all these things things. And then we started to think about what we were doing and it's just a matter of so if social ties are so important for our physical health, what's the easiest thing we can do? And we just started to look at this simply telling people why we appreciate them, simply giving a voice to the love that we feel for our family members, for our good friends. It's that we have so much of that inside of us and unfortunately it stays there for no good reason. And so we're just giving people a channel to let that go.

Yeah, it seems kind of silly that we wait until people die and then say nice things about them. Like, why not let them know how you actually feel? And it's awkward, it's uncomfortable, it's not something we're used to doing. And it seems like you've created a lot of easy ways for people to start to feel comfortable doing that. You know, prompts and cues and questions and things that allow them to start to express themselves in ways they maybe haven't before. But it's really beautiful and so simple and all you need is your, like.

Basically your iPhone or like nothing, right? Absolutely, yeah, so it's from computers and everything and we've really started to look at, you know, those reasons as well as why don't people share these things? And I think that there's some very tangible things. It's that if you're telling someone that you love them, you may be unsure whether they're going to reciprocate that love and so you may keep it inside. You know, you may not know, you know, a lot of people are home for Thanksgiving and they want to tell their parents that, hey, like I love you, I'm so grateful for you, they might not be comfortable getting that emotional at a table or in front of a group and so we keep that stuff inside. And so really as we think about Tribute as a technology product, but how can you actually create and design an experience that makes it easy and comfortable, almost thoughtless to be thoughtful? And so, you know, a few of the things.

I love that thoughtless makes it thoughtful. That's great.

Yeah, it's like, you know, there's so much going on. It really is. It's like so many people in the technology space, you know, they create these really addictive products because they want you to spend more time, whereas our goal is to create products that are really simple and easy to use so that they can do things that really connect you with your friends as opposed to just using an app that's sucking your time. And I mean, one of the first things that we came up with is you talked about prompts. I think that that's a really powerful tool that people can use with Tribute, but also in their own lives, is that the second that you have a group that understands that they're all kind of buying into answering a single or maybe two questions about someone, I'll just use Mark for example. If it's Mark's birthday, we're sitting at a dinner table, if we say, everyone's going to go around the table and we're going to say one reason why we love Mark or one of our favorite things about Mark. So now what's happened is you've created this positive peer pressure where everyone knows that they're going to answer the same question. You set a baseline of here's what's accepted and celebrated. So now you really do empower everyone to actually articulate something that's inherently emotional and meaningful And also, it's when you ask a question, you take some of the guesswork about what to say about someone, because when you give someone a prompt question, it immediately evokes that kind of introspection. So now I'm immediately thinking about, okay, what do I love about Mark? What's my favorite thing about him? So now I have an answer and I'm more capable of actually bringing that out to life.

That's so great. So what have you found? You've done 30,000 of these now. I'm sure you've heard all kinds of stories. What are the impacts of having these videos, these tributes shared with people. How does it change their lives? How does it change their relationships? How does it make things different for them, their families, their friends? What happens on the back end? It's like the front end is so cool, right? You kind of send an email out, you get everybody to upload their video, you create this really cool experience for people, it's easy to share. But at the end of the day, there's a fallout from that. What is the the good fallout that you see from that?

One of our favorite statistics to track here, and it almost sounds silly to talk about it, so as I mentioned when I watched the first tribute, I sat in the back of the room and I was bawling my eyes out. And as we started to give those first tributes in the early days, so many of our customers got back to us and said, oh my God, thank you so much. Like they cried tears of joy. And we heard it so many times in those early days, that we actually added it to our customer feedback survey. And so the last question- Tears of joy. Is literally, did the recipient cry T-O-J, which is our internal metric for tears of joy. And I kid you not, to date, with 30,000 of these, 80% T-O-J rate. People saying that the recipient cried tears of joy. And it's like, again, I have to remind people that this is a product.

I mean, you're just talking about it, I feel like crying. It's just amazing.

So it's just, you know, it's that. And then, you know, you think about the use cases where we get to leverage this thing. And it's, you know, one of my favorite ones to date, I got goosebumps from this one, was a conductor at the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra who gets an hour-long video from all the musicians that he's educated and taught for 30 years playing their instruments and talking about how they impacted their music and their creativity. And then you have, you know, soldiers who are deployed overseas. And so we partnered with nonprofits. to get deployed soldiers, free tributes who can't connect with their family. But now they're going to get this thing when they wake up on Christmas morning and it's going to be everyone in their family telling them how they love them. You know, in the medical context, it's again, it's, you know, we were inspired to do this because of a man named Felipe who, and we told the story at the Cleveland Clinic, but who's a father of three, newly married, you know, he gets diagnosed with cancer in his knee and they end up having to take the leg and he comes out of that operation and you can imagine that it's just such a difficult thing to deal with. And so one of his friends reaches out and he says, Can we do something? And I said, Absolutely. And it was that first experience where I saw 30 people from all over the world come together to share, Here's who you are to me. Here's why I love you. And the message that we get back from the next day is just again one of being awestruck and thankful that he was able to connect with his community. And it's just to give people that sense of connection is something that we care so deeply about. It's why we're here and why we're excited to bring it to the masses.

That's so good. So how do people want to do this? How do they do it? If this sounds great, they want to like it's holidays, they want to give this as a gift for Christmas to somebody, or they want to give a birthday present, or they know someone who maybe is, like you said, a soldier overseas, or someone who may be sick or suffering.

How do you begin to start to do this? Yeah, absolutely. Well, number one, you just go to tribute.co and one of the best things about this is that we really say that we've taken a 15-hour process and we've turned it into a 15-minute one. And so whether it's a big birthday for someone you care about, whether it's a wedding, a graduation, really wanting to get someone something meaningful for the holidays, this is it. We literally just drop a list of emails into our system and our people will take care of everything.

Just give me the emails and then that's it, it all gets handled.

And then we take care of everything. And then we've taken it to the next step now and really turned it into a product and what you can do now. So again, it's you know, you got a 25 minute video for your birthday. So now we have our customers, they have an option to actually take that video and put it onto an LCD video card. So it's a physical gift with their tribute playing on it that you can gift wrap that someone opens up on.

Christmas morning that someone can leave on the tree. Really?

Like a little screen with the video on it? Yes. Imagine if it's like this is a four-inch screen and it's like, so you have basically this or like one of the seven inches that's sitting right inside of a greeting card that you open up and you get to watch your.

Tribute playing and it just sits there. Such a great idea.

So awesome.

You have a leak for sure. Wow. Well, you know, I encourage everybody to check it out. It's what tribute.co? Tribute.co. Tribute.co. And if you really love somebody, this is the best gift you can give them and Thanks for doing what you do Andrew. It's really making a big difference. It's great to see people and companies doing things that just make the world a better place.

I super appreciate it. Absolutely brother. I'm happy that you got one. I'm excited for you to give a few and look forward to seeing some.

Of these folks on the site. Thank you so much.

Keep doing what you're doing. All right, adios. Adios.