Micro Habits, Big Impact on BRAIN.ONE with Thoryn Stephens

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I need somebody to verify it, hands down.

As you know, the hallucinations are out of control.

We're taking a little bit of a different framework, but we're actually starting with scientific papers, summarizing them, using them to train the models and so forth.

But you have to have a human in the loop.

And so you can be that human at the end of the day.

And it's absolutely critical.

You cannot count on the machines to do all the thing.

This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network Production.

We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month,

taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes.

You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks?

Well, it starts right about now.

Right about now.

Hey, what's up, guys?

Welcome to Right About Now.

We're always talking about how you need to stay ahead of business, tech, AI, anything and everything that's happening in the business and marketing world.

We're here to tell you, thank you for making us number one.

I am Ryan Alford, your host, coming to you from Greenville, South Carolina, here in the new South capital of the U.S.

That's what we call it.

And I have friends that in high places sometimes that introduce me to friends in higher places and cooler places and all those things.

This is one of those instances where it's both a pleasure and insightful for you because we've got Thorne.

He is the CEO and founder of Brain One.

What's up, Thorne?

Hey, Ryan.

So good to see you again.

How are we doing?

Hey, man.

I enjoyed our call a few weeks ago.

Love what you're doing and pumped to just have a little discussion, man.

100%.

Let's do it.

Thorne's on the road, taking time out of his busy schedule for us.

Tell the audience where you're at now, what you're up to.

That will probably set the table more than anything for kind of where we're headed with this conversation.

Yeah, so I'm based in Colorado and I'm currently in Venice, California, Venice Beach, LA.

And then I'll be giving a keynote at the Longevity Leadership Conference at the Verizon Technology Center and talking about all things longevity, brain health.

And then joining me on stage will be a famous NFL champion, Malik Jackson.

And he's an ambassador for Brain One and will be joining us and discussing some of the protocols and programs we're building with him around neurological optimization and TDI support.

The longevity space, the brain space, you're probably going to get tips, insights, things that you should be thinking about literally for your brain as executives, founders, all the people that are listening that fall in these categories.

We all need to be thinking about brain health a lot, but also protocols.

And then there's a big story here on influencer platform, audience retention, and growth and monetization.

We're covering a lot of paths here, Thorin.

That's why I love this topic, because it really encapsulates a lot of different things.

Because when you think about influencer marketing and you think about people of influence, they all have paths to success that they have, both daily, weekly, monthly.

So they have protocols that are valuable.

A lot of them, especially maybe non-celebrities that don't have constant representation, but are influential, don't always have the clearest path to monetization, capturing all of that audience giving them a place to go and live and learn from them one thing to catch social posts but that's what i love about your platform is it kind of is all these things in one thorn let's set the table of your background and what led to brain one starting off i am a molecular biologist and a researcher scientist at my core i was working towards a phd but ultimately jumped directly into drug development and biotechnology.

This is in the 2000s.

Worked for essentially a startup that got purchased by Amgen directly out of college doing small molecule drug therapeutics.

So quite literally, I was part of the molecular biology, but genomics team.

And so we were going after novel, essentially drug therapeutics and mechanisms of action.

My team would be focused on essentially the cloning, the characterization, the expression of very specific novel proteins, essentially, you know, DNA makes proteins.

So I worked in biotech first half my career.

And then as I moved to Southern California and I actually was here in Venice Beach for 10 years, I became a data scientist.

Not a lot of biotech, not a lot of science in LA, especially back then, and really took a structured framework to my approach to data science.

So by the time I was 20, I could genetically modify any model organism.

By the time I was 30, what I found is we could really optimize any human behavior to do the thing online.

And that's the idea of using insights, hypothesis testing, and then rapid iteration at scale.

And that was the general framework.

And I applied that to a number of industries from media to e-commerce to retail.

And it was quite successful.

And then it was actually two years ago.

I mean, literally almost to the day, Ryan, I was traveling.

I was overseas in the Mediterranean and I had this this epiphany for ultimately brainwan and came full circle back into my roots of science.

And it's really just been a rocket ship ever since.

Alpha, about one year ago, we're still kind of in the public stealth where people can go online, they can sign up, but we're, you know, slowly letting people into the platform, growing like crazy.

It's exciting.

Congratulations on all of that.

It's an interesting path.

And I know you've been entrepreneuristic, you know, probably your entire life, but like where you're doing it with others and for other companies and all of that, and then transitioning into your own thing.

It's rewarding.

And especially when it's playing in such an important space like longevity and protocol and all those things, I feel like a little bit the last 15 years, 10 years, whatever you want to call it.

And I think about like the marketing space, we've gotten in such a shotgun world where it's just, what do they say?

Fire aim ready.

Because the platforms and the speed with which stuff happens, iteration is allowed.

But what I love about what your background is, is what you just said: is the greatest marketing decisions and things that impact sales are that movement of a consumer or person from position A, current mindset, to position B, C, or D, wherever we need them to go, based on research and trends and data and other things that then influence creative, that then influence decision.

Creative could be a lot of different things, by the way.

SEO, it could be ads, it could be TV, all those.

Brain out with me just a little bit about what you did in that space and your kind of perspective on marketing here and the now.

One of my first jobs when I got to LA was working as a junior analyst, essentially.

So really started off, you know, the ground floor, but everything I did was focused in measurement.

So in biotech, it was on the molecular level.

In the context of digital platforms, it was really focused in user level and then media ultimately.

And so we were using metrics like customer lifetime value a decade ago.

And that idea of understanding current valuation, future valuation, and that kind of being the systemic method, essentially, of measuring your users.

And then also on the media side, similar methodologies, right?

So things like multi-touch attribution is what we were doing then, utilizing essentially customer journeys, understanding fractual attribution, and then tying that back to the ultimately your customer acquisition costs.

And then obviously, you know, the CAC and the CLV type equations.

We were doing that about 10 years ago and doing it at scale and really understanding, again, the value of your media and then ultimately the value of your user base and kind of become the norm now, which is great.

I was just on a call with a Wharton professor about two weeks ago.

His name is Peter Fader.

Peter is a marketing professor and wrote literally the book on customer centricity, lifetime value.

And I've known Peter now for many, many years.

And I was actually one of his advisor to one of his companies called Zodiac, focused only in CLV.

So again, user level measurement.

And we sold that thing to Nike within less than a year, basically.

And now his current firm is focused on what's called customer-based corporate valuation.

So that idea, you understand the value of your customers over essentially the footprint, and then that gives you a corporate valuation.

And so the mainstay of everything I've ever focused on has been within measurement.

And then again, the idea of understanding journeys and pathways and then optimizing and iterating very quickly.

And side note, you have this generative AI explosion.

I mean, we were doing dynamic creative testing with meta, Facebook, you know, back in 2017, 18.

We were doing programmatic SEO years after that, really utilizing these tools to generate content, copy, and ultimately value at scale.

So, a lot of these things, you know, now it's just like catching up, but certainly not the most novel.

But the tools have gotten completely commoditized and now they're super cheap.

So, exciting times.

It is.

Now, the best ideas win.

I think there's still some truth to this.

I think you're proving it out.

You know, execution is everything.

It is, but the path to execution is a lot cheaper, faster, cleaner if you have the ideas now.

It's kind of like, okay, battle of the ideas.

Yeah.

I mean, I've worked with some really interesting creatives over the years.

And even back then, I mean, this is like, you know, seven, eight years ago, you know, they'd be like, this is the best creative.

And I'd be like, is it though?

Instead of giving me one, give me five creatives and we're going to test them and we're going to see what the, you know, the actual consumer says about that.

And usually they're always wrong.

And so, you know, now these methodologies, A-B testing, multivariate, you know, it's all kind of the norm, which is great, but you don't necessarily know.

And especially dealing with creatives, they always feel they're correct.

And, And, you know, not always the case.

The ivory tower that the creative department lived in, I was in Manhattan for five years, let me tell you.

Okay.

I had a brittle plastic key to get in every now and then when they allowed me at the door.

Sure.

You know.

Yeah.

But that's the good thing about data is, you know, it's unequivocal.

I mean, you literally, you know, you run five creatives and then you know.

So exactly.

Before we transition heavy into brain one and some of the exciting things there, I do want to pick your brain because you're one, you're so fucking smart.

But number two, what's happening with AI and business, marketing, white-collar jobs?

What say you to the reality that's our doorstep of where all this stuff is at?

I'm an optimist at heart.

And I feel, again, having used these tools for many, many years, that they can be used for good.

And I think that if you're in one of these roles now, you better understand them immediately.

And we're applying them at Brainwalk in a few different ways that we can talk about in a second.

But I think it's really important to embrace the technology.

And honestly it's not that different than you know what i saw in biotechnology in those industries and how the you know the tools have just become more commoditized and cheaper ultimately you know you can literally sequence your dna basically in your kitchen now you can do crisper at home i mean there's all these like home kits and people are doing some pretty crazy stuff out there not that i totally recommend it but if you really want to become a leader in the space you have to know the tools and you need to understand you know where we're at today where they're going and how to utilize them.

And so I actually think it's an opportunity if you know how to use these tools.

But I think if you're just sitting on the sidelines and watching, you're going to get left behind.

I agree.

There will be some jobs lost, but I think it is primarily the ones that just think this is a fad or that aren't embracing it.

Because you're just going to have people that work and do 10 times more than you because they use them.

I haven't seen, and even with the Agentic AI and the agents and stuff, which is amazing.

And you can automate a lot of stuff.

There's still a human creativity.

a human component to management of these things the right way that I don't think is going away in the next few years.

I think some things will go away that we do that we probably don't want to do anyway, but there's still going to be someone driving the car.

You're either going to get a license or you're going to sit at home.

How we apply these models at Brain One, you have a human in the loop.

You can have the machine create the creative, create the copy.

You still need somebody to verify it, hands down.

As you know, the hallucinations are out of control.

We're taking a little bit of a different framework where we're actually starting with scientific papers, summarizing them, using them to train the models and so forth.

But you have to have a human in the loop.

And so you can be that human at the end of the day.

And it's absolutely critical.

You know, you cannot count on the machines to do all the things.

So there still will be governments and, you know, someone who needs to oversee the processes and the workflows and, you know, so forth.

What's the most random prompt you've ever given ChatGPT that you can remember?

I think it's interesting to ask the machines around spirituality, things of that nature, or psychedelic.

I've asked a couple of questions again around AI believe in God?

I haven't asked that.

Yeah, sure.

So, I mean, this is getting a little deep in the weeds, but

you could go there.

a white paper i'm thinking about writing is again the expansion of consciousness and so you know that idea that if you take a quick step back expansion of consciousness throughout the ages you know you have things like say prayer meditation psychedelics again indigenous uses of a number of psychedelics for i mean tens of thousands of years and now we're on this inflection with what's called bci in brain computer interfaces and our chief brain futurist at brain one his name is dr galen buckwelter he has six neural implants right now and so one of the questions i asked Chat GPT was, you know, around, again, the concept of what does the expansion of consciousness look like relative to BCIs?

And specifically, you know, I'm with Galen.

He's doing a clinical trial at Caltech.

So you've heard of Neuralink.

This is similar, although these are different.

His arrays are called, it's part of the BlackRock Neuro-Utah array.

They're an 8x8 chip, and he has six of these on his neural, you know, essentially tissue right now, one in the prefrontal, five in the neocortex.

And so we're at Caltech doing a clinical trial, Ryan, and he connects his brain to the internet, literally.

I mean, you you want to talk about the matrix and so forth.

So we are seeing the intersection of

machines.

He can quote it, like his, he knows that knowledge.

Can he dig it to the internet?

Well, again, it's not.

So right now, what it's primarily doing is recording, you know, the different electrical activity, the different places within his brain.

But they can also do excitation.

You know, and of course, in the future, will we get to the point where you can actually download a jiu-jitsu routine and know jiu-jitsu?

Well, we're not there yet, but you know, certainly in the future.

Can you see that future with what you know?

You know more than the, you know, 99.9% of it, you've seen enough.

Is that feasible with where it's headed?

Yeah, they're making progress for sure.

And again, to be clear, that's not my focus relative to my research, but I've seen this firsthand at Caltech, and it's incredible where it's going.

The immediate applications are Galen's aquatriplegic, and so he is in a wheelchair, and it's for him to facilitate the science, but he can control a robot.

I think there's a possibility in the future for sure.

Yeah, these technologies are moving very, very quickly.

I watched some of these old movies.

I watched iRobot the other day with Will Smith, and I'm like, are we creating like these horror movies or are we creating like the good versions of them?

Yeah.

I mean, it's an important dialogue, especially now.

It is.

Talk to me, Thorin.

Why brain?

What got you into this longevity space and the brain space?

What kind of was the fundamental thing that started you down this path?

So I've always been very fascinated by just the idea of biological optimization.

I began doing triathlons in my 20s, and that went all the way to full Iron Mans.

And what I saw is that when I was wearing a wearable, and so in that sense, we had the big chunky garments back then, but through the use of data, I could ultimately optimize my biology, period.

And then, you know, the devices have only gotten better.

And right now I'm wearing three, I'm wearing a whoop, I'm wearing an aura, I have a garment.

But that concept of, again, using data to optimize your biology.

And so as I was going down that road, what I saw, you know, relative to my training and my racing is that I could attenuate my lactic threshold by doing X or Y and ultimately start to get faster and stronger and all of these things.

And that was through the use of a structured framework or a protocol.

And so I think it's important to kind of start there.

What is a protocol?

A protocol is just your daily routine at the end of the day.

When you get up in the morning, what are the things that you do on a regular basis, period?

And if you take a quick step back and you look at all of the protocols that are out there around things like longevity, it kind of comes back to really key areas: it's nutrition, it's exercise, it's stress, and it's sleep fundamentally.

And at Brain One, we fed every protocol from Huberman to Peter Attia to Brian Johnson to Kayla Barnes, you know, into our AI.

And ultimately, it's kind of in those four major categories.

And then the protocols are comprised of microhabit.

What's a microhabit?

A microhabit is a small incremental change that ultimately you can measure theoretically, ideally.

So it's an example, cold punging.

Again, being a triathlete, we've been doing red light, cold punging, I mean, for like decades.

And it's cool.

Now, like, these are all the rage.

It's a great mechanism to help, you know, manage your autonomic nervous system.

So cold plunging, though, you look at that as a microhabit as part of a protocol, you're looking at temperature of the water, you're looking at duration in the water, you're looking at frequency per week and so forth.

And so those are all essentially the variables within that microhabit as part of the protocol that you're optimizing.

And so what I saw on the triathlon side is that following this structured framework, you can really optimize your biology.

And about two years ago, I was doing some work with a group out of Columbia University focused in the protection of neurological data.

And that's actually a very important area for me personally.

We were the generation that gave away all of our behavioral data, especially you talk about marketing.

And I remember back in the day when the Facebook API, you could download everything.

Same with Twitter.

You could literally with a fire hose around the data.

Now it's a walled garden, of course, all this stuff quite well.

But, you know, that said, that concept, we gave away all of our behavioral data under the guise that we're connecting with our friends from junior high and high school.

But really, what we were doing, we're training models for these large technology companies.

And so we're also on the cusp for neurological data.

And so I was doing some work with this group called the Neuro Rights Foundation and focusing on the protection of neurological data.

And what does that mean on a state, federal, international level?

And what I saw was that there was just such a lack of resources around brain, a lack of resources for education and ultimately lack of resources for protocols.

And so that was kind of the initial impetus.

And so we went down the road of focusing on brain and building essentially the noom for neuroscience is how we would frame it.

What does that mean?

If you're familiar with Noom, so this is a behavioral weight loss essentially platform using CBT, so cognitive behavioral therapies.

And they've been incredibly successful because what they do is they focus again on that concept of Q rewards and microhabits optimizing your behaviors as opposed to just calorie counting.

And it's interesting because Noom is now valued at $4 billion, whereas like two weeks ago, Weight Watchers just filed for bankruptcy.

Why?

Well, Weight Watchers is following, you know, these older methodologies, your calorie counting, you got the colors.

And honestly, it's just obviously mismanaged as well, but it's just an outdated mechanism in something like Noom for Neuroscience.

That's really where we have been focused.

And it's the idea of, again, these small incremental changes that ultimately impact the whole human with ultimately essentially habits that they can learn and integrate.

And it's not like a fad.

So that's really what we've been focused on, you know, relative to that kind of approach, ultimately to brain, which has never been done before.

It's really fascinating, the micro habits.

We complicate things as human beings sometimes.

And I think it's somewhat of a mechanism.

Well, if it's complicated, then I have a reason not to do it or self-sabotage.

Go down the whole psychoanalysis of that.

But these micro habits and understanding them and training based on what some of the most successful athletic, it's simple, but smart as hell.

It makes a ton of sense.

Incremental change.

That's it.

It's why do people fail after the new year saying they're going to do X, Y, or Z?

It's because they set these, you know, big goals and ultimately, you know, they're not approaching it from that perspective of incremental progress.

I'm going to change everything.

And that's the hardest part.

I've been building these analytical systems.

I've applied it to a number of industries and private equity.

The machines are the easier part.

It's the human behavior.

That's always the hard part, you know, at the end of the day.

And we're creatures of habit.

And so fundamentally focusing on the reason why and how usually we'll get them there quicker.

Sidebar, but on point, I'm thinking of Thorne like making a decision in the kitchen.

And how much data goes into that?

Tell me you let your hair down sometimes.

Oh, for sure.

As we were chatting about, I'm also a musician.

I really actually have both sides of my brain that are firing constantly.

So very much analytical, but also very much a free thinker.

And I'm a multi-instrumentalist.

I've been a drummer since I was five years old and I've been composing punk and electronic.

I do have a punk single coming out next month in July.

It'll be under my name.

Yep.

I mean, you have a perfect name kind of for science or music or art.

Thor's like, yeah, it covers all the gamut.

You can go any direction with that thing.

I appreciate that.

Yeah, it's a punk song.

We're actually including neural activity in the song.

So Galen is singing with me on this and he has a microphone in one hand.

And then we're taking his brain signal literally out of the neural implants.

And essentially, he's controlling a synthesizer.

So he's singing and controlling a synthesizer at the same time.

First time in human history.

It's all for fun.

It is fun.

You're going to have to send me a copy of that.

I want to hear it.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like punk.

I definitely like kind of that electronic.

I don't know.

I had just time in my 20s where I was into some electronics.

I grew up a rock guy and country and all that stuff.

But then there was like this electronic year or two.

I don't know.

I think it was that time period that I grew up.

I love that.

I love all of it.

My father's a, he's a guitarist, played banjo, bluegrass, you name it.

You did a great job of kind of setting like Brain One, I think at like 70,000 feet.

Let's come down to the ground floor of how this is getting into the hands of both the people setting protocols and maybe the consumers, the endgame.

The simplest concept is you are a reflection of your daily routine.

So when we use the word protocol, we know it's a bit science-y, but it's really just following a series of steps.

And ideally, you have a measurement mechanism behind that.

And so specifically where we started at Brain One, we were essentially feeding in every paper on neuroscience that you could find, and then we were summarizing it.

And so as a very specific example, have you ever heard the hypothesis that dementia is preventable?

I have heard that.

Generally, it's the paper that's cited is called the Lancet 2020.

It identifies roughly 12 behavioral, essentially modifications, lifestyle microhabits that you can do.

And that 30 to 40% of global cases of dementia, there's about 55 million today, could be essentially supported, improved through these behavioral modifications.

And so these are things like connection, clean air, hearing, and some of these things, if you live in a city, you may not have the cleanest air, but there's a number of things that you can do.

And so very early on, we took a paper such as that and we put it into the AI.

And then we generated essentially an editorial.

And then secondly, we generated a protocol.

And we're going to be giving these away on brain one.

These are things our parents are terrified, literally right now, of dementia and Alzheimer's.

And so there's these structured frameworks that you can follow.

that ultimately will help prevent these things.

And of course, there's a genetic disposition, Alzheimer's, you have that ultimately you have have the specific genes.

You may have the expression and thereby, you know, have the phenotypic, you know, essentially impact on your life, but you can still essentially have the impacts of the expression at bay, essentially, is the concept.

And that with following these types of health protocols, we can help support ultimately the vision of reaching a billion humans and help supporting their brain and biological health.

So that would be one example.

So again, taking the paper, running it through the AI, you get an editorial, you get a protocol, and then just giving these away.

And then our core model, again, is the new neuroscience.

So we've developed a 12-week, essentially neuro-behavioral brain optimization program that is comprised of microhabits.

We have a series of measurements.

We have, you know, essentially daily exercise, weekly exercises that people can follow with a very specific measurement.

And the measurement is based on cognition, it's based on biometrics.

And then we're also working towards blood biomarkers as we speak.

Interesting.

You know, if something just crystallized for me, I'm going to throw it out there as like my interpretation now.

I almost feel like you're building, when you think about the research that goes into medicine or products or whatever it's always the r d right i feel like brain one in a way is setting itself up to be the real world in market everywhere r d for protocols for any type of health wellness whatever because you're taking the existing data summarizing it creating a protocol like you said people do it they're you're getting the bio feedback see how that is you can improve it or change it based on that on almost any type of thing related to health and wellness.

We started in brain where it just because I saw that is the greatest need.

We're not taught about the nervous system or really brain health as a child, and especially not as an adult.

So that's where we've started.

But you know, where we're going, to your point, I mean, this is a structured framework.

So we can white label the platform.

We've got a number of white labels that are out there now.

Women's health.

This is an area very near and dear to my heart.

Why does every single woman I know have a thyroid issue?

Endocrine disruption.

And so because it's a structured framework, it can be applied to anything.

And so now we're working on protocols for perimenopause, menopause, PCOS, endometriosis.

And to your point, again, it doesn't really matter.

You have the protocol, you have the microhabits, you have the feedback loops, and the structured framework can be applied to anything.

I was speaking about a month ago on Necker Island and speaking in front of Branson and these amazing humans.

Afterwards, this woman came up to me.

She's like, oh my gosh, I am so excited you're focusing on perimenopause.

I'm going through it right now.

She's 33 years old.

And so what we're seeing is this.

shift.

And so the vision, again, is to give away these protocols to humans so they at least have a structured framework to to follow because this can be reversed.

That's what we're also seeing as well.

And what's the cause of this?

Well, environmental toxicity is a potential cause.

You know, things like phthalate, you've got BPAs, PFAs, glyphosate, fragrances.

Side note, that's potentially a massive cause of these types of disruptions.

And so on one hand, we're trying to spread awareness, but we're also trying to provide an actual solution that people can use to measure and ultimately improve their life.

life.

My wife's a cancer survivor and thinking she's made a had to make a lot of changes and protocols protocols and everything else and now she's healthier more fit than she's ever been moms that takes those wake-up calls but i've been thinking through like the journey of that and the protocols and she's taken a lot of feedback from a lot of places but then created her own it's really fascinating to think about all of those micro habits and everything that kind of add up to any one given protocol and that's when i knew we had a product i started this off i bootstrapped it and as i showed the concept of the framework of the protocol to people, they were like, oh my gosh, I'm doing that in Excel.

I can't tell you how many of those conversations I had.

Literally, people who had been looking for a solution such as this and they were doing it again in Google Sheets or Excel or whatever it might be because there was nowhere to really put all of this data.

You know, there was nowhere to track the different microhabits over time and trend.

I mean, one woman she created like gamification and streaking around it to see if she was on or streaking.

And that's when I knew we had a product that people really needed and that we could really, really help support ultimately up to a billion humans is the goal.

What's interesting is tie a bow around it, is the opportunity for both people of influence or just people in general to monetize and gain value from what they've learned, what they've implemented, and sort of that knowledge capital, for lack of better words.

Talk about that a little bit.

You mentioned early on around influencers.

I'm not really a big celebrity guy, but I will say having lived in LA for about a decade and even now in Colorado, I do surround myself with some really incredible humans.

And one example is I'm actually speaking at this longevity conference with Malik Jackson.

And so Malik is a Super Bowl champion and honestly, just such an amazing, amazing human.

And I got to know Malik over the last number of months.

We actually met at a bioresonant clinic over at the Four Seasons.

It's called Sports IQ in Westlake Village.

And they're doing some really interesting things around bioresonance and the use of Tesla coils and frequency and connected with Malik and showed on the platform and he was just blown away.

And so he's come on board as essentially a brand ambassador for us.

and taking his health protocol and putting it onto the platform so people can download it and utilize it.

And then we're working towards a program with him to support his colleagues that are dealing with TBI.

We're working with world-class neuroscientists and MDs.

And again, that idea of having the protocol that, you know, is built into the program that people can follow ultimately to help with some of the things that they're dealing with, you know, relative to traumatic brain injury and some of these other areas.

And it's just incredible.

And do people ask about your health protocol?

And every single influencer athlete says yes, because it happens all the time.

There's so many articles out there right now.

Taylor Swift, Tom Cruise, what are they doing essentially in their daily routine?

And you're curious, how do people perform that hard and that strong?

And again, it's following a structure protocol.

So that's something we're embracing, working with amazing athletes, world champions, but also just normal everyday humans.

There's a good friend of mine in Aspen.

She's a two-time cancer survivor.

She swam the English Channel.

Her name's Allie.

Her protocol is on the platform.

Single mom of two, and she just crushes it.

And so we're not just appealing to world-renowned athletes and influencers, but it's the normal everyday human.

We had a woman the other day that is working on a cowgirl protocol.

She lives in Ohio and she has her own way of doing it.

And again, there's commonalities in these things, being outside in nature, and I come back to nutrition, exercise, stress, and sleep is kind of the core.

But then geographically and just all over the world, people do these different things to optimize their health.

And so that's actually been a social aspect of what we've built.

We had one guy, a triathlon buddy of mine, and we were training for the Malboo triathlon here.

This is two years ago.

And I had a team, actually, a brain one team.

And we had about 10 people that were racing with us before I even launched the company.

They were so dedicated to health.

And he rolled in with these jar of worms.

And these were cordyceps worms.

And they are not cheap.

It was about $1,000 for these worms.

And literally, they're cordyceps worms.

And that was one of his microhabits, nutritional supplement specifically.

And we crushed that race.

He got first place in his age group named Dean.

And he, you know, eating these cordyceps worms.

And so again, that's a nutritional supplement as an example.

example, but people, we all do these different things.

And now a lot of them are becoming more mainstream.

10 years ago, we were doing red red light, and now it's on Tony Robbins' website, which is cool.

But a lot of these things are not necessarily new.

They're just becoming more mainstream because people are looking outside of just core Western medicine and just focusing on the disease.

Now it's prevention.

And that's a big theme we see across the board in these protocols is how do you help prevent these things before they actually become a disease?

So that's really an integral part of what we're doing, too.

That's why I love the crossover.

With my other show, Vibe Science,

we're just trying to shine light on both sides of the equation.

Modern health, the innovations that are happening there, but the alternative wellness protocols and that shouldn't really have the word alternative in front of it.

It's just wellness

and longevity.

And let's get ahead of it.

Let's prevent this stuff from ever happening versus the treatment, the never-ending treatment of the problem once it's there.

Going back to brain health, you don't want to be thinking about your brain just when you're in your 50s and 60s.

You want to be thinking of this ideally in your 20s.

20s and 30s, at least that foundation of health, and then into your 40s and 50s.

So you're not seeing the impacts in your 60s and 70s.

By the time the tau and amyloid proteins start building up, the good news is you can still have support, but the sooner you start to address these things, obviously the better.

In your adulthood, obviously being healthy, ultra marathons, all these things that you've done had protocols that you have.

And so you have a lot of knowledge there.

But now being at the center of brain one, everything you're doing there, you're learning a lot.

Let's give some two or three micro habits

value to our audience of, yeah, if you do nothing else, do these.

Let's do like three.

So of course huberman talks a lot about the impacts of direct sunlight in the morning when you get up and that whole concept of your chronotype and circadian optimization so direct sunlight is absolutely critical another is connection every microhabit we have hundreds of protocols now right and then we have thousands of microhabits and so you can click on the direct sunlight exposure microhabit and you have the benefits you have the how to do it and now we're doing videos by the way we're using a scientific paper that's the one thing that's different around what we're doing we're not just asking Chat GPT, tell us the benefits of X.

We're actually taking a peer-reviewed scientific paper and that becomes the backbone.

So everything that we're building is ultimately cited, but it's also using Gen AI.

We touched on this earlier.

So side note, and now we're doing it at scale.

So it's interesting how to utilize these tools.

Another really big one is connection and related is purpose.

So part of what we built into that, you know, the platform is that concept.

When you get up in the morning, it's connection.

It could be connection to yourself.

It could be spirit, source, whatever you want to call it.

We don't care.

But finding that connection and people that wake up that have purpose and connection generally live 10 to 15 years longer.

And it could be a book club.

It could be meeting with friends at a coffee shop.

It doesn't matter.

But people that are the most isolated, you know, generally have a lower life expectancy.

So I think those are a couple really important ones.

And then you could also look at, you know, learning a new thing.

It could be a musical instrument.

Don't feel, talk about neuroplasticity, learning a new language.

It could be an instrument and keep learning into your 70s and 80s and so forth.

Never stop learning.

Those would be some of the three really important areas that anyone can do and you can do them for free.

You don't need some fancy machine and you don't need to pay X, Y, or Z.

And then, of course, I love all the standards.

You know, I'm a big cold plunge guy, which isn't good for everyone.

But for me, I'll tell you what, measurement of my own stress and the autonomic parasympathetic nervous system, you know, cold plunge, of course, would be another one.

What's worse for you?

Having a sleep-deprived night or eating a big juicy cheeseburger?

Lack of sleep for sure.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, hands down.

You know, and again, you can eat a cheeseburger every once in a while.

There's nothing wrong with that, but it's if you're doing it every day, that's when the problems occur.

But you, to the prior question, you're not going to be neurologically optimized if you're not sleeping.

You're not going to be just neurologically, you know, biologically optimized.

And if you're not getting the right amount of sleep, so we're actually working on sleep stacking protocols as an example.

There's one thing people could do.

It's find the best sleep you possibly can.

And then I'd also recommend right now I'm wearing woo and an aura and a garment.

I do time series to see what's the most accurate.

There's no standardization of like HRV, heart rate variability, but at least just having a track so you start to understand those patterns and then you can start to optimize your behavior.

It's a game changer for every single human on this planet, period.

Yeah, you can't change what you don't track and measure.

Absolutely.

You cannot manage what you don't measure.

Yeah, I had a mentor that told me that, you know, 20 years ago and to this day.

So that's really important.

And these tools have gotten cheaper too.

So you can get these trackers a couple hundred bucks, even less than that.

Where can people learn more about everything, Thorin and Brain One?

Brain.one, O-N-E.

We've got a wait list.

And if they mention your name, Ryan, and right about now, we'll put them to the forefront.

We're going fully public in the next three months, and we'll be taking this thing out.

And the vision of giving away these protocols.

And then we have these brain optimization programs.

And really just appreciate your efforts and all the things you're doing.

And, you know, appreciate the opportunity.

Love it.

Can't wait to build on our relationship and all things Brain One.

It's exciting.

It's important.

And it's changing a lot of lives.

So I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Awesome.

Thank you, Ryan.

And appreciate your audience.

Hey, guys, you're going to find us, ryanisright.com.

You'll find links to Brain One, Thorin, all the information.

There's a lot of the stuff that we had today that you can access there.

Appreciate Thorin for coming on.

We appreciate you for making us number one.

Give us a like, give us a review, share it with a friend.

Hey, friends, share right about now with their friends.

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We'll see you next time.

All right, about now.

This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production.

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