 Okay, we can all agree that distracted drivers have become a big problem. You know what I'm talking about, people who drive like this and they're messing around with all their phones and they're looking down and they're looking up and they're looking this way and they're Instagramming and they're filming something, Snapchat, TikTok, whatever it is. Yeah, these things are pretty cool, but they're not cool when you're driving a car. And if you're a fan of this channel, that means that you get outside a lot, either on a bike or running or just simply as a pedestrian. And when we're sharing the roads with vehicles, we trust them to stay away from us, right? We're in our little bike lane, they're in their lane. But more and more these days, people, drivers, distracted drivers are hitting pedestrians, cyclists, runners, anybody on the roads. And luckily, my new friend, Ryan, has developed an app called This App Saves Lives. It's a really cool app and it's incentive-based. You get rewards for not driving distracted as if not killing somebody with your car isn't incentive enough. Anyway, I had a long conversation with Ryan and I'm gonna play it right now. It's super fascinating, it's creative and I think everybody should download this to their phones right now. All right, what's up, Ryan? How you doing, buddy? Doing well, Ryan. How you doing today? I'm doing great. I'm excited to have you here on the channel. This is a very important topic. This is near and dear to me and all of my viewers, we're cyclists. We get outside, we're pedestrians. Everybody has experience walking across the streets and dealing with cars that aren't paying attention. So tell me how you developed this app and what's your goal with it? Yeah, so for me, Ryan, a couple of years ago, I was actually pretty badly injured and nearly killed when a distracted driver ran a red light while sending a text message and at the time I was living in New York and would always wanna start my day out as a serial entrepreneur with something invigorating, something to get the endorphins going as I know you can relate to. And so would always go out for a morning bike ride and unfortunately, the morning that I was going to meet with the CEO of the company that was ultimately gonna buy the company that I was running at that point in time, I was involved in this accident. And I was very lucky in that I saw the driver coming right towards me so I could swerve to avoid the direct collision, but I ended up flipping over my handlebars, fracturing my hip, my elbow, some other bones in my body. It was in pretty rough shape for quite some time. And so the genesis for wanting to put an end to such a dangerous behavior really just started out as me personally experiencing that pain point. How quickly after that did you think I need to do something about this? It took me a little bit of time. Honestly, I spent the next year or two working with the company that bought my first business and at the time spent quite a bit of my time and effort researching what solutions were out there to put an end to this. And generally what I found was that there had been some technology that would block your ability to receive a signal or send a message. But the reality is nobody likes to be told what not to do. And I found very little in the form of using rewards to stimulate positive behavioral change as opposed to punishments from preventing people from making the wrong choices. And so using this whole tried and shrewd behavioral psychology method which finds rewards stimulate far more change than punishments. We kind of combine that with the product that we built today to create this app saves lives. And so tell us how the app works. So yeah, it's a free app. It's you search for in the app store this app saves lives or taskful. You download it once, you can effectively set it up and then forget it. It actually runs in the background each time you start moving above a certain rate of speed. So by the way, cyclists like you, the seconds you go out for a nice little ride assuming you're moving above a speed of 10 miles an hour which I know you are, it'll automatically kick on in the backgrounds. And then drivers or cyclists in your case will earn rewards points for time spent driving or cycling without engaging with your phone in a distracting manner. So things like hands free calls, streaming your favorite music or podcasts or YouTube channel is absolutely fine. But the second that you go to meaningfully interact with your phone to check your email at a browser web to send a text to scroll through your Facebook feed and so on and so forth. That's when we stop issuing you points we actually take a few points away. And so it's a carrot not the stick approach but there is a little bit of a stick that we wave just to disincentivize that behavior. And then over time you accumulate all these great points you visit the rewards portal built within the app and you see all sorts of discounts and incentives and free products and services offered by brands all over the country, Reebok, Shake Shack, Urban Outfitters, Insomnia Cookies, Bomba Sox, Fitness Facilities, Athletic Apparel and so on and so forth. And so we're using the opportunity to earn great rewards to really make that desire or far bigger desire than that immediate need that is to pick up your phone when you're behind the wheel and engage in distracted driving, baby. So the goal really with your app is to encourage people to drive their cars and do nothing more than drive their cars, right? And distracted driving is it's something that's really a problem these days. Do you happen to know some of the stats? How much of an increase there's been nationwide? How many more people are getting hit? It's pretty terrible candidly. Two million accidents every single year just in the US alone. Half a million injuries and nearly 4,000 deaths. And those statistics, by the way, are pre-COVID. What COVID has done for us all, unfortunately, there's been all sorts of studies that have shown that we are now more addicted to our technology than ever. And it's sort of the perfect storm because you've got drivers opting for the relative safety of their own private cars in place of public transportation where they are more susceptible to getting sick from COVID. And so as a result, you've got more drivers on the road. You've got more, by the way, you've got more cyclists and commuters on the road. And you've got a whole host of individuals that are more addicted to tech now than ever. So it is the perfect storm for distracted driving behavior, which makes our mission and our focus and your and mine and everyone else's collective interest in the subject even more imperative today than ever. As a cyclist of bicycle advocates, I want more people to be riding their bikes. But one of the number one reasons why people don't ride their bikes more is because of safety and they're scared. And when they hear stats like this, they're like, I'm not gonna ride my bike on the streets, wherever I am in the country, even Boulder, which is a great city, it's just not worth the risk. Totally, it's a boon for mountain biking where you're off the roads, but for the rest of us, it just changes things. And my risk profile as a father now has completely changed. I was an Iron Man triathlete at some point in time. And I did crazy things cycling would get, I mean, biking in New York City itself, you would argue is pretty nuts as it is. And so given the magnitude and the impact here, it just, it makes you not wanna get on the road. Tell me some of the success stories. How's the app doing? What's your goal with it? We want everybody to have this app, download it now, then stop messing around with your phone when you're driving your car. First and foremost, I get to do things like this. I get to talk with great individuals who care about this. We built an exciting company behind this mission. And it's a company that we ran through a business program called Techstars, which was founded in my old favorite town of Boulder, Colorado. We've onboarded all these great brands that are sponsoring great incentives. I mean, to be able to say that Reebok is offering rewards and Urban Outfitters and Insomnia Cookies, Shake Shack, all these other great brands is big for us. We've got tens of thousands of drivers using TASL on a daily basis. We've partnered with great organizations. It could be me, which is an organization based in Colorado. We're partnering with cycling organizations around the country. We're partnering with employers and schools and insurance companies. We were just on a podcast with Dr. Oz and Marcus Lomonis. We've been in the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Wall Street Journal. And so it is something that people resonate with. It is so pervasive throughout all aspects of our lives that having these conversations with these great organizations or great media outlets or great brands, it's just a natural connection point for us all. So again, somebody downloads the app. It's super simple. I've done it. When you get into your car, it just starts working when you go more than 10 miles an hour. And then let's say you go on a 20 mile drive and you look at your app on your phone and it's like, all right, I have all these miles. And as you gain the miles, you gain more points to get discounts on cool stuff. Yep, exactly. You earn points for driving safely. And that safety measure is really, it's based upon your distracted driving behavior. What are you actually doing on your phone? You instantly earn points. You can redeem them right away. And we also have some gamification built in so you can compete against yourself and see how you're improving over time. Much like Strava has competition amongst fellow athletes. So too, does this app save lives, allow you to see who's the safest driver at your workplace or at your friends and your family and so on. Do you know if there's gonna be any laws coming down the pipeline in the United States about severe penalties for distracted driving? There's legislation passed on a nearly daily basis. For fun, if you set up a Google alert for distracted driving, you'll get a daily feed of all the legislation that comes in every single day. And so there is a ton of legislation, the challenge with legislation alone. And legislation is great, but legislation alone, it doesn't necessarily solve the problem because your odds of getting caught are fairly minimal. And so people are still gonna engage in that behavior because what are the chances that one in 100,000 chance that a police officer is gonna see me behind the wheel driving distracted? Which is why this whole negative focus never really worked. Whereas if you say, you know what, regardless of whether I get caught or not, if I engage in that behavior, I'm not gonna earn these great rewards. That all of a sudden flips the conversation. It gets people focused on all of the excitement that comes with those rewards as opposed to the small chance that they're actually gonna be punished for doing the wrong. I love it and I'm so glad that I met you and I will be cheering you on. I'm gonna use your app, even though I'm not a driver, but it still works when I'm on my bike, which is cool because there is distracted biking, you know? It exists, it exists. You can hurt some people, you know? And yeah, I wish you all the best and we'll be supporting you. All right, there it is, TASL. Go download it right now. This app saves lives. You can search for it in any app store. I will also link it directly in the description down below and you'll notice that I already have 735 points. I'm gonna earn me some rewards. And the reason why is because I ride my bike a lot and I don't have a car, I've never had a car. And you'll notice on my channel that I haven't been doing a lot of road touring lately. Mainly it's because I'm scared of drivers out there. I don't trust drivers these days and it's unfortunate. I've been mostly sticking to single track and, you know, back road adventures to stay away from cars. You know, and there's some really cool rewards in here. My favorite is insomnia cookies. Oh yeah, I love cookies. I also love burritos. There's so many cool rewards in here. And that's what I love about this app. It's reward-based, it's not punishment-based. And hopefully this works. This can spread like wildfire and it's easy to use. Once it's on your phone, it just works in the background, which is really, really cool. And at the end of the day, it's not about the rewards, not about cookies. It's about making the roads safer for everyone. Not just pedestrians, because distracted driving affects other cars as well. Car accidents and all that kind of stuff. So go download it, tell your friends about it and hopefully we can make these streets safer. So thank you so much for watching this video. Please like and subscribe and we will see you down the road.