Mastering Age Reversal with Richard Rossi
Introduction, in this interview, Alan Olsen, CPA, MBA discusses age reversal and AI with Richard Rossi, Founder, daVinci50.
Transcript (software generated):
Richard Rossi
And I don’t know if you remember the day, chat GPT first came on your radar. For me, it was my birthday, the 13th of January of this year. And I’ve never gotten through a day since where the word chat GPT, or AI has been uttered by someone and one of my calls and age reversal, the ability to regenerate organs, things that were nothing but a dream for the history of humanity are about to become reality. Now, they’re still below the water surface. Age reverse chat GPT was around for three years before, raised above the water surface.
And COVID was around for many months before it raised above the water surface. I don’t know precisely when that’s going to happen to this. But when it does, it’s going to begin the process of the most dramatic change, improvement and disruption in humanity.
Alan Olsen
Welcome to American Dreams. My guest today is Richard Rossi. Richard, welcome to today’s show.
Richard Rossi
Happy to be here.
Alan Olsen
So Richard, you have a very colorful, past lot of entrepreneurial love, you know, paths that you’ve taken a life. And so I’m really excited to hear from you today about how you got to where you are today. So if we could start maybe a little bit on Yeah, giving us some of your background of you know, from college, your major and Chan then Nana, you know, your, your path after after graduation?
Richard Rossi
Absolutely. Well, I came to Washington, DC to go to Georgetown University. And about a year later, I started working in the United States Senate as a staff person. And I actually went to school at night and spent nine, six years getting through college, and nine years working in the United States Senate. After that, I started my first business. And I’ve been an entrepreneur ever since. So I like to say I’ve never really been employed because I don’t think working in the Senate really counts. It’s a very unique environment.
My first business actually, when I was 28 years old, was creating the first computerized system for political campaigns that up to that point, had been keeping all of their records on three by five cards and little, you know, file folders. And we look to completely automate that. And we did that successfully. We had several clients, and then we failed spectacularly. And while that was unfortunate, it did give me an MBA the hard way. Long story. But I became very interested in high achieving young people with some of the work I did for my senator.
And I had an opportunity with a partner to create a company that would bring young people high achieving high school students to Washington, DC to learn about democracy. And we tried it. We actually used direct mail. Yes, folks, direct mail, and I had to $2,500 she had $2,500. We did one direct mailing to the schools. If it had failed, we’d all just have gone home. And it worked. And anyone that’s in the direct mail or direct response business knows that’s incredibly unusual to have the first try work, but it did.
And, and we grew slowly from there, over a number of years, where we were then creating programs for high school students on leadership and self improvement. We then went down to the fourth and fifth grade, we went up to junior high school, we went to college, we went overseas, and over the course of about 20 years, 23 years. We built a what I would call big little business. We had about $150 million a year in revenue, 250 employees, three stories of a building that had our name on it. It was it was really going well.
And then at a certain point, my business partner became ill and she’s 25 years older than me. And around 2010, we decided we needed to sell the business. So, in 2011, we sold it to a investment company out of San Francisco. And that was a whole podcast in and of itself, the, the joys and the horrors of selling a company. But it, we did it. And I set out a two year non compete agreement. And then I decided I still wanted to help these amazing, incredible, fantastic, high achieving high school kids.
And I decided I wanted to do something that was bigger, shorter, less expensive, more intense. And I went with the idea just came out to me out of nowhere, as almost all my ideas do have a stadium event, you might remember or know of Tony Robbins and Tony does these huge events for 1000s and 1000s of young adults, and I thought why can’t I reproduce this with young people. So we rented a stadium and outside Boston, Massachusetts.
And we recruited 1000s of high school students who are interested in becoming doctors and medical scientists, and their parents. And we brought them all into this stadium, 9300 people. And we put on the stage the biggest names in the world. Nobel laureates, Dean’s of medical schools, great inventors, young geniuses, we broadcast in a live surgery. But most important of all, we brought together 1000s of high school kids who had a passion for becoming doctors and medical scientists for helping humanity.
And we put them in an environment where they could inspire each other. A lot of them are nerds and geeks and feel a little out of their own skin and their hometown and in their school, but they arrived here and all of a sudden, they were with their people 1000s of others who thought they were cool about what they were doing was cool. And in just two and a half days, we created this amazing transformative experience called the Congress of future medical leaders.
And and it really did show them how big their future could be and showed them the path of how to get there and showed them how to fight fear and show them that the only place where failure is not okay is in school, because in school failures enough. But in life is you and I and all the listeners now, failure is absolutely essential. It’s market research. So getting them to fight fear to understand failure to see Nobel laureates talk about how many times they failed before they succeeded.
Long story short, it became kind of a cross between a TED conference a Tony Robbins event and a rock concert. This lovin for science. And, and I’m still doing that every year, we went virtual for a few years because of COVID. But now we’re coming back live. But it’s it’s two and a half of the best days of my year for sure. And as I got older, I started getting very interested in what at the time was called Healthy Aging. And something incredible happened over the period of 20 years where I started getting interested in this.
And that’s healthy aging started to morph into longevity. And then longevity started morphing into actual age reversal. And so I don’t know if you remember the day where the word COVID came first onto your radar. I remember distinctly is the 12th of March of 2020. And from that day forward, I don’t think a day went by for two years where I didn’t hear the word COVID. And I don’t know if you remember the day we’re chat GPT first came on your radar. For me it was the my birthday the the 13th of January of this year.
And I’ve never gone through a day since where the word chat GPT or AI hasn’t been uttered by someone on one of my calls and age reversal. The ability to regenerate organs, things that were nothing but a dream for the history of humanity are about to become reality. Now they’re still below the water surface.
Age reverse A check GPT was around for three years before it raised above the water surface. And COVID was around for many months before it raised above the water surface. I don’t know precisely when that’s going to happen to this. But when it does, it’s going to begin the process of the most dramatic change, improvement and disruption in humanity. So I went two directions. The first is I created a mastermind for 50 people to study this. So we would always know what to do, who to trust, and how to get to the front of the line.
Because things are moving so fast, right? Now, we need to separate the signal from the noise, we need to be able to very effectively figure out what we should do. And I thought, gosh, that’s too expensive for me to do on my own, I better share that with a bunch of folks. So we can bring the greatest minds in the world. And, and we do, and then separate from that. And lastly, I decided to start the world’s first trade show for the regenerative and rejuvenative. Medicine, industry. And just to be clear, rejuvenative means age reversal.
If you look it up in the dictionary, it’s a medical term, the synonym of which is a traversal. And then regenerative medicine is where we take parts of your body that are not capable of regenerating themselves, your heart, your kidney. And we actually create modalities by which the body can heal those organs. And that will change the world in and of itself. Just the kidney alone, when you think of the number of people who die and have disease, we’re within five years of being able to cure kidney disease.
And that will change the lives of many, many 10s of millions of people around the year around the world every year. So it’s an incredibly, incredibly exciting time, in a time, of transition, from theory, to reality from the laboratory, to actual people. And I don’t know when it’s going to be that day, or it comes on the average person’s radar. But when it does, it will never go away again. And that’s my life in six minutes.
Alan Olsen
Well, Richard is an amazing path that you’ve crossed in life and built. The couple of follow up questions here, though, kind of curious, your first event, filling 9300 people into a stadium had to be a little nerve racking. Every entrepreneur tries to hedge their risk. How did you? How did you go about building that community to ensure success on the first trial?
Richard Rossi
Well, I had a big advantage. And that was coming out of my previous company. I had over a period of decades, figured out how to get young people to actually do this to make a purchase, to show up. We’re a taxpaying organization, we’re not a nonprofit. And we still, and I just everyone who’s watching and listening should just hang on inside of their table for a minute. Yes, we still sell through direct mail. And we’ve developed over decades, a highly effective way to do that. And I left the old company with that knowledge.
So think about the advantage I had, I knew my audience, I knew how to get to my audience. And I knew how to convince my audience to do what I hoped that they would do. So my chances of success going into this were much higher than someone that was starting from ground zero. As to going on to the as to the size of the whole thing. I also over the years had learned how to put on events. That’s all we did in the old company was put on one event after another after another.
So I knew how to put together a great event team and at the end of the day There’s only three parts to a business, there’s the selling part, there’s the delivering part. And then there’s the operational part of the business. That’s it. business, large business small, those are the three key parts. But when I started this business, I said to my initial staff, and I’ve said to every staff person ever since the most important thing we do in this company, is not inspire young people. It’s not changed the world.
It’s not show their parents how to help their kids. It’s Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, is the most important thing we do in this company. Why? Because until you sell something, not a life is changed, and not $1 is earned. Every life is changed through marketing. So everybody in this company things a little differently than in many companies where marketing is a necessary evil, or it’s an afterthought, or if it’s, it’s something that isn’t properly invested in, it’s the most invested the most important thing we do.
And as to the stage. Well, it’s interesting, you ask that because I’m the moderator. So for the first time in my life, I had to hold an audience and get on a stage with 9000 people. And I was beyond nervous, I was a rock. And I decided, well, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll take all my key points, and I’ll put them on a huge piece of paper, I’ll start on the left side of the stage. And I’ll put them down one after another after another in really big letters. And if worst comes to worst, I’ll just walk to the left side of the stage.
And I’ll just start going through the notes, go to the next one, go through the notes, go to the next one, go through the notes, and I’ll survive that way. Well, I did start that. And then about two hours into the first day I said, you know, I’m pretty good at this. I’m actually not that nervous at all, now that I’m on this stage. In fact, they’re loving me, and I’m loving them. And it’s at that moment that I realized in my 60s, that I had a skill I never knew I had never knew I had.
And that was the ability to effectively be put on a great show and be the person that could inspire a room of that many people. And there’s two parts to that. One is the content part. But much more important is the ability to actually hold the room to be able to hold their attention to not lose them. And I discovered I have that natural ability. Who knew?
Alan Olsen
Well, you got a new conference coming up. I guess it’s into the future about a year away on longevity. As you want to cut it get in your head right now, Richard, with mastermind and everything else, we’re going to some fascinating turns of medical advancements. We’re not quite there yet. But we are trying to plan a conference into the future while months away, which is an eternity based on how quickly technology is changing. Now.
How do you go about that to make sure that at the time of the conference, you have the most current information there could be for the audience?
Richard Rossi
Well, that’s a wonderful question. The companies that are being invited to be part of this trade show this congress this event. They’re, they’re not brand new. They’ve been around a while. And as I said, many of them have been engaged quietly, in clinical research for years and some for decades. This is this. When you talk about age reversal, or you talk about regenerative medicine, this is incredibly complicated. It’s incredibly difficult. And you’d be amazed.
Hundreds and hundreds of these companies have tremendous backing from the venture capital community. A number of them are public companies and Even though they started years ago, this incredible moment has has come this inflection point where all of their work seems to be coming to a head pretty much at the same time. It’s incredible. It’s unbelievable. So what’s happening is for many of these companies, they’re now able to say, we’re almost ready. Are you almost ready? Yeah.
And then all come together and collaborate based on the fact that they are getting very close. Now, these are not, I want to be extremely clear about this. These are not supplement companies, these are not companies making devices that are for sale on Amazon, these are hard core science companies doing FDA trials, all of this is by the books. And then there are a whole bunch of companies below them that are younger and newer, and just starting out and doing incredible things.
So the first time around, will be for the two or 300, big boys, the ones that are leading the way and have been leading the way for quite a while now. And for the big, big names that are associated with that. And then as we grow, we will include more and more of the newbies and start going overseas, because so much of the important work is being done over there. But it’s just really important for me to impress on on everyone listening today, that this is not science fiction, this is not hucksterism, this is hard science.
And the things that will be made available to you, for the most part are going to be FDA approved. interventions. So if I’m going to rejuvenate a kidney, it’s going to be done with an FDA approved modality. But it’s it’s all coming together. That is the thing that makes it so incredible. And I should also mention that I’ve been around a while, and I missed a lot of the things that have changed the world. I was kind of asleep at the wheel when the when the personal computer was invented.
I was asleep at the wheel when the World Wide Web was invented. I was asleep at the wheel for many of the things that have changed the world since I was born. But I’m not asleep at the wheel for this one. I am right there. At the at this incredible moment. And I feel so blessed to be there.
Alan Olsen
So Richard, how does the habit How did the listeners connect into your community to stay abreast of that at the conference and what’s developing?
Richard Rossi
Well, the conference, the abbreviation for it’s got a long name regenerative rejuvenative and industry trade show and Congress. But it’s an abbreviates to three characters are to Amazon, Mary R to m.org. And if listeners go to that site, they can then get on to a list where we will send them information every month or two to keep them up to speed as to what’s going on. If they have a much greater interest in actually knowing precisely what’s going on. And in this world.
There’s an option to get every week or two a newsletter that summarizes what’s been happening because you’re absolutely right. Things are happening so fast that it’s hard to keep track sometimes. And then if you have folks that have high school students who are interested in medicine and they’d like to learn more about the Congress of future medical leaders, they can go to futuredocs.com
Alan Olsen
Richard it’s been a pleasure having you with us on American Dreams
Richard Rossi
It’s such a pleasure thank you so much
Alan Olsen
I look forward to keeping in touch and as things develop with this conference for the spring of 2024
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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Richard’s superpower is to convene and inspire greatness. Over the past 35 years, he has had the privilege of motivating more than 800,000 high-achieving young people as they strive to become their best selves.
Richard arrived in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1973 to attend Georgetown University; however, one year later he was unexpectedly required to completely support himself and his mother. He bought a suit, began working full time for U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, and focused on school at night.
In 1979, after Richard’s mother died suddenly, he was entirely on his own with no family in the United States. At the age of 27, after graduating from Georgetown and working nine years in the U.S. Senate, he left to form his first company, Campack Systems, which created the original computerized campaign management system for candidates seeking federal office. Although that business failed spectacularly, Richard did manage to “get his MBA the hard way,” as he describes it.
At the age of 30, Richard and his business partner founded the company that would become EnvisionEMI, the world’s largest creator of live educational enrichment programs for high-achieving students in fifth grade through college.
By 2010, EnvisionEMI had grown to comprise more than 250 employees and $125 million in annual revenue, and it was creating programs on leadership, life success skills, and a wide range of career goals for over 50,000 students a year — all over the world.
In 2011, Richard and his partner sold EnvisionEMI to a private equity group. After a two-year noncompete agreement, he founded the daVinci Alliance, which continues to inspire high-achieving high-school students interested in medicine and the sciences, through large stadium events held each summer outside Boston, Massachusetts.
More than 9,000 students and their parents attend these educational programs each year, which bring together Nobel Laureates, deans of medical schools, great inventors, young geniuses, and even surgeons broadcasting live from the operating room.
In 2019, Richard founded the daVinci50, a small mastermind of accomplished medical professionals, scientists, and businesspeople, all seeking guidance on age reversal and regenerative medicine from the brightest scientific minds in the world.
Awestruck by the passion and commitment of the people in this industry, and driven to contribute his talents to the acceleration of their success, Richard was inspired to found the Scientific Rejuvenation and Regenerative Medicine Industry Trade Show and Annual Meeting in 2022, which he plans to make the largest and most impactful gathering of companies and individuals leading the future of medicine.
Alan is managing partner at Greenstein, Rogoff, Olsen & Co., LLP, (GROCO) and is a respected leader in his field. He is also the radio show host to American Dreams. Alan’s CPA firm resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and serves some of the most influential Venture Capitalist in the world. GROCO’s affluent CPA core competency is advising High Net Worth individual clients in tax and financial strategies. Alan is a current member of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (S.I.E.P.R.) SIEPR’s goal is to improve long-term economic policy. Alan has more than 25 years of experience in public accounting and develops innovative financial strategies for business enterprises. Alan also serves on President Kim Clark’s BYU-Idaho Advancement council. (President Clark lead the Harvard Business School programs for 30 years prior to joining BYU-idaho. As a specialist in income tax, Alan frequently lectures and writes articles about tax issues for professional organizations and community groups. He also teaches accounting as a member of the adjunct faculty at Ohlone College.