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

0:00As a brain one, you have a human in the loop. You can have the machine create the creative, create the copy. You still need someone 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.

0:29We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over 6 years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts 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., as we call it.

1:07And 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.

1:38That 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, L.A. 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 we'll be joining us and discussing some of the protocols and programs we're building with him around neurologic optimization and TBI support.

2:08The longevity space, the brain space, you're probably gonna get tips, insights, things that you should be thinking about literally for your brain as executives, founders, all the people that are listening that follow 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 past here, Thorne. 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.

2:46So 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. Thorne, 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.

3:25This 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 for half my career. And then as I moved to Southern California and 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.

4:02So by the time I was 20, I could genetically modify any model organism. By the time I was 30, what I found is we can really optimize any human behavior to do the thing online. 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 the epiphany for ultimately brain one and came full circle back into my roots of science.

4:33And it's really just It's been a rocket ship ever since. Alpha, about one year ago, we're still kind of in a public stealth where people can go online, they can sign up, but we're slowly letting people into the platform, growing like crazy. It's exciting. And congratulations on all of that. It's an interesting path. And I know you've been entrepreneuristic probably your entire life, but 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.

5:02I 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.

5:42Creative 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 in the now. One of my first jobs when I got to LA was working as a junior analyst, essentially. So really started off at 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.

6:12And 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.

6:47I 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.

7:16And so the mainstay of everything I've ever focused on has been within measurement. And then again, you know, the idea of understanding journeys and pathways and then optimizing, 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.

7:47So 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. Execution's everything. It is, but the path to execution is a lot cheaper, faster, cleaner if you have the ideas now. That'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 seven, eight years ago, 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.

8:19And usually they're always wrong. And so, you know, now these methodologies, AB 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, you know, not always the ivory tower that the creative department lived in. I was in Manhattan for five years. Let me tell you, I had a, a brittle plastic key to get in every now and And then when they allowed me at the door, 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.

8:49So 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 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, you know, 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 BrainWine in a few different ways that we can talk about in a second.

9:26But I think it's really important to embrace the technology. And honestly, it's not that different than what I saw in biotechnology, in those industries, and how the tools have just become more commoditized and cheaper, ultimately. You can literally sequence your DNA basically in your kitchen now. You can do CRISPR at home. I mean, there's all these 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 this space, you have to know the tools. You need to understand where we're at today, where they're going, and how to utilize them.

9:54And 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.

10:30I 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 Brainwine, you have a human in the loop. You can have the machine create the creative, create the copy. You still need someone 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.

10:56But 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 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 we could go there.

11:29A 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 BrainOne, his name is Dr. Galen Buckwalter, he has six neural implants right now. And so one of the questions I asked ChatGPT was around, again, the concept of what does the expansion of consciousness look like relative to BCIs?

12:06And specifically, I'm with Galen, he's doing a clinical trial at Caltech. So you've heard of Neuralink. This is similar. All these are different. His arrays are called, that's part of the BlackRock Neuro Utah Ray. They're an eight by eight chip. And he has six of these on his neural, you know, essentially tissue right now, one in prefrontal, five in the neocortex. And so we're at Caltech doing clinical trial, Ryan, and he connects his brain to the internet, literally. I mean, you want to talk about the matrix and so forth. So we are seeing the intersection of biology machines. And does he actually record it?

12:34Like he knows that knowledge? Can he dig it to the internet? Well, again, it's not key. 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 jujitsu routine and no jujitsu? Well, we're not there yet. But, you know, certainly in the future, you see that future with what you know, you know, more than the 99.9 % you've seen enough, is that feasible with where it's headed? Yeah, they're making progress for sure.

13:07And 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 a quadriplegic 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.

13:40It 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 Ironmans. And what I saw is that when I was wearing a wearable, And so in that sense, we had the big chunky Garmins 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 Garmin.

14:17But 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 sort of get faster and stronger in 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.

14:54It'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 Atiyah to Brian Johnson to Kayla Barnes 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 what's an example? Cold plunging. Again, being a triathlete, we've been doing red light, cold plunging, I mean, for like decades. And it's cool. Now, like these are all the rage.

15:26It's a great mechanism to help 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.

15:54And 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 have a fire hose around the data. Now it's a wild 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 were training models for these large technology companies.

16:21And 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 NUM for neuroscience is how we would frame it. What does that mean?

16:50If 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 cue rewards and micro habits, 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 and something like Noom for neuroscience.

17:26That'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 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, if it's complicated, then I have a reason not to do it or self-sabotage, good on the whole psycho analysis of that.

17:56But 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 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, private equity. The machines are the easier part.

18:27It'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. Eyebar, 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.

19:03I do have a punk single coming out next month in July. It'll be under my name, yeah. I mean, you got the perfect name kind of for science or music or art. Thor is 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.

19:33First time in human history. It's all for fun. It is fun. You have to send me a copy of that. I want to hear it. Absolutely. 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. 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, 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.

20:03Let'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 end game? 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 sciencey, 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?

20:36I have heard that. Generally, it's the paper that's cited is called the Lancet 2020. It identifies roughly 12 behavioral, essentially modifications, lifestyle micro habits 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.

21:12And 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 the specific genes. you may have the expression and thereby have the phenotypic, essentially impact on your life, but you can still essentially have the impacts of the expression at bay, essentially, is the concept.